pdf VS WeasyPrint

Hi dang, hope you are well. May I kindly ask why not? I spent two weeks writing the CSS / HTML / JavaScript, and did well documented code - in fact the output serves as both documentation of the code and also output from it (in my own stupid way, I was thinking I was following Donald Knuth’s Literate Programming Approach :D).

The repo (https://github.com/ashok-khanna/pdf) contains all the necessary code and is intended for others to reuse in their projects. Some of it isn’t straightforward, despite the guide looking easy - I had to figure out how CSS selectors and counters work for example, how MathJax interacted with Paged.Js.

I think the confusion comes from it being labeled as a “guide”, in fact it’s a full set of code to give the required functionality for high quality PDFs from HTML, using paged.js, the guide is just the self documentation as I figured I might as well use documentation for the sample output. Otherwise, I’d be genuinely curious on what constitutes Show HN vs normal posts?

I think the repo description and the way the output is confusing / unclear - the primary goal is very much meant to be a code base for people to reuse as I’ve noticed for many programmers, the design side can be a bit more elusive.

Separately, would it be possible to add beautiful back to the title - it’s not really about producing PDFs from html as browsers can already do that, and there are many other tools. The main aim is to have the functionality to produce very high quality typeset PDFs from HTML, which until now, I only felt PrinceXML did well and that’s a paid solution. Maybe we could say the title is “High quality PDFs from HTML using Paged.JS”? I know there has been a separate discussion on another thread on the overuse of the word beautiful in describing code - my view is that it has its place when it relates to output / UI.

Thanks for reading, and no issues otherwise (no need to reply).

Is there a reason you didn't consider something like Weasyprint?

https://weasyprint.org

I've gone through a number of systems to convert CV's, business cards, and other docs and it hasn't let me down yet.

You don't _have_ to use a browser. I had very good results with Weasyprint [0]. And there's also PrinceXML [1] if you're willing to pay.

[0]: https://weasyprint.org/

Thanks for your answer! I imagined you would be using PrinceXML behind the scenes since that is probably the gold standard in HTML+CSS rendering.

The only open source alternative I know of is WeasyPrint at https://weasyprint.org/. I'm not sure how well it fares against PrinceXML, though.

And thanks for the pointer to Taffy - I didn't know it before!

Flexbox support has been [included][1] since 2018, although my use case was the prototypical one - a single row w/ 3 columns - so YMMV with how it handles more complex layouts.

[1]: https://github.com/Kozea/WeasyPrint/pull/579

Performance is not the strength of WeasyPrint, meaning that heavy HTML files will increase generation time. You should always compress images before attaching them, as they are not compressed by default. Generating a 50-page-long PDF may take up to a minute in extreme cases, although multi-page documents generated on my project take fewer than 2 seconds to generate.

For Python there is Weasyprint: you prepare the invoice as an HTML document, and Weasyprint turns it into a PDF

https://weasyprint.org/

Well yes, but you can implement HTML+CSS. WeasyPrint did from scratch, and independent implementations of HTML+CSS are considerably more numerous than HTML+CSS+JS.

In a recent project I used https://github.com/Kozea/WeasyPrint/ it is written in python, so you will need to use it like so:

You should maybe check out weasyprint. https://weasyprint.org/