Wicked Pdf VS WKHTMLToPDF

You have a few options when trying to create a PDF in a Rails environment. Prawn and Wicked PDF have been around for quite a while. I have been using both gems and they work fine. However, they have a few limitations that can make it difficult to handle more complex PDFs. I recently discovered Grover, which can remediate some of this inflexibility in creating PDFs.

# WickedPDF Global Configuration # # Use this to set up shared configuration options for your entire application. # Any of the configuration options shown here can also be applied to single # models by passing arguments to the `render :pdf` call. # # To learn more, check out the README: # # https://github.com/mileszs/wicked_pdf/blob/master/README.md WickedPdf.config ||= {} WickedPdf.config.merge!({ layout: "pdf.html.erb", orientation: "Landscape", lowquality: true, zoom: 1, dpi: 75 })

A couple of popular gems to convert HTML to PDF in Rails are PDFKit and WickedPDF. They both use a command line utility called wkhtmltopdf under the hood; which uses WebKit to render a PDF from HTML.

Thanks for sharing - it takes a lot to share these sort of personal experiences. I've definitely been there, too.

Aside from all the good and valid comments about reducing scope and shipping an MVP, I'd like to raise another point which may be controversial (or even wrong), but still worth raising:

Would it have been different if you had used Rails? A few of the problems you mention (rich text editing, validation, and to some extend, pdf exports) are very easily solved in Rails. Take rich text editing: It's literally a couple minutes to use ActionText. Or validations / forms, there's really not much work to do. PDF exports are also not too hard via wicked_pdf [1] if you're okay with fixing some formatting quirks later on.

I've seen both worlds by writing tons of JS / React code myself, and at that time (2016-2018) those problems were almost an order of magnitude more time-costly to implement in SPAs. I remember react-router.. not great memories.

Of course, all the points reducing MVP scope still hold, yadda yadda, but.. if you could have had all those features (nearly) for free, would you be at another stage now? Who knows.

[1] https://github.com/mileszs/wicked_pdf

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?

I use the command line to wkhtmltopdf to create pdfs from wrb pages in an automated way.

Disclaimer: I stopped using many BIFs years ago in favor of dropping down to the command line and either using CFExecute or CFX_Exec[http://adiabata.com/cfx_exec.cfm] to run apps like WKHTMLTOPDF (for PDF generation) and GraphicsMagick (for image manipulation). The result has been faster performance, higher quality results (data or display-wise) and the ability to perform tasks offline and/or concurrently.

https://wkhtmltopdf.org/ *mic drop*