mdbook-latex VS WKHTMLToPDF

mdBook allows you to create book from markdown files. It's pretty much alike Gitbook but implemented in Rust. However, unlike Gitbook that supports using calibre for generating PDF, for a long time, mdBook doesn't support generating PDF files natively, and supporting that is also not in their roadmap. Existing plugins (backends) such as mdbook-latex that utilize Tectonic as well as pandoc solutions will generate a PDF page that doesn't unify with the existing mdBook generated HTML version. Considering these facts, I created a mdBook backend named mdbook-pdf for generating PDF based on headless chrome and Chrome DevTools Protocol Page.printToPDF.

We’ll start with the WickedPDF gem, which is powered by the wkhtmltopdf command-line library.

The only “sane” way I’ve found to be able to deal with pdfs is through this tool https://wkhtmltopdf.org/

wget + https://wkhtmltopdf.org/

Thanks for the suggestion! KnpSnappyBundle was my initial way to go as well, but my pages use quite some Javascript (chartJs) to render and I couldn’t get wkhtmltopdf to work with it. As it seems wkhtmltopdf does not support ES6 https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf/issues/3596 so I was forced to find another way.

wkhtmltopdf — Generates PDFs from HTML documents.

Of the HTML-based pdf-engines pandoc supports, prince would have the best typography, but I don't like recommending Prince because it's proprietary and costs money. (I try to stick to open source when I can.) wkhtmltopdf is the fastest, but uses a pretty old codebase, and doesn't even support paged/print css. weasyprint is a little better in my experience, but still has a ways to go typographically. pagedjs-cli is just a wrapper around headless Chrome/Chromium, and while Chrome has made improvements with regard to typography, Google turns off some of those features (e.g., hyphens) in headless mode, which is annoying.

Concerning pdf there is the well known wkhtmltopdf , but let me say that I love the not so well known percollate

Did you try wkhtmltopdf and WeasyPrint, by any chance?

Since the srd uses standardized links (base/creature type/creature name) you could make a list of urls based on your selected monsters in a spreadsheet, then use a program like https://wkhtmltopdf.org/, https://www.weenysoft.com/free-html-to-pdf-converter.html, or the url conversion feature in Adobe Acrobat Pro if you combine all the urls into an htm for Acrobat to pull from.