pdfsizeopt VS WeasyPrint

> ...tools like pdftk have been able to losslessly compress them...

I have had good luck with pdfsizeopt.

https://github.com/pts/pdfsizeopt

The big restriction is that the classic Postscript typefaces are not available (no Times, Helvetica, or Zapf Dingbats), and the PDF file must bundle any fonts it uses.

The pdfsizeopt package will make any PDF smaller, and I think it deletes letters/characters from the included font that are not used.

https://github.com/pts/pdfsizeopt

This is missing the "pdfsizeopt" suite, that bundles statically compiled utilities to reduce size.

Static compilation means that it will run on most Linux platforms without extra required software.

I believe one aspect of it will remove characters from included fonts that are not used.

It really is quite impressive.

https://github.com/pts/pdfsizeopt

There is a general PDF shrinker, known as "pdfsizeopt" that is bundled with static builds of gs and a number of other utilities.

It cuts some of our PDFs to 10x smaller, mostly by removing unused fonts (but doubtless also some other magic).

The developer asks for donations for production use from those who can afford it.

https://github.com/pts/pdfsizeopt

Send donations to the author of pdfsizeopt:

https://flattr.com/submit/auto?user_id=pts&url=https://githu...

Christian Mehrstram, creator of Whitehack, uses emacs to write LaTex documents, then converts those into PDFs using a script called pdfsizeopt.

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/