Apache PDFBox VS WeasyPrint

Are you looking for a way to render PDF's or produce them? If you want to produce PDF's, I've used https://pdfbox.apache.org/ successfully as well as https://itextpdf.com/ (potentially costs money).

If you don't mind using java, you can use the open source Apache PDFBox library

https://pdfbox.apache.org/

It's relatively performant and it's a mature and supported codebase that can accomplish most pdf tasks.

Then, open the pdf_utils/pom.xml file and add a dependency to PDFBox, in the dependencies section:

There are some libraries for Java that can help you create a PDF file such as PDFBox or IText. Here there's a short exaplanation on how to use them.

So, when I started to view the documents, a lot of them simply failed to open. I had to look around for a library that could verify PDF documents. I had some experience with PDFBox in the past, so it seemed to be a good go-to solution. It had no way to verify documents by default, but it could open and parse them and that was enough to filter out the incorrect ones. It felt a little bit strange just to read the whole PDF into the memory to verify if it is correct or not, but hey I needed a simple fix for now and it worked really well.

PDFBox can do this. It’s not part of the CLI but it wouldn’t be too hard to add:

https://github.com/apache/pdfbox/blob/5b00807463279f1002e245...

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/