WKHTMLToPDF VS DinkToPdf

Some of those problems I had in the past, but at the time I was just rendering tables for a financial report. The main problem I remember having was the CSS part and the long generation time. Because I was not implementing the styling at the time, the CSS part was not really my problem, and I am sure wicked_pdf provides some default styles to help in this part. The long processing times were a problem because we were generating pdfs with over 100 pages, this process would take about 5 min and would get worse if more pdfs were being requested in parallel. I can’t remember what the solution was at the time but I think we ended up generating some pdfs in the background and sending them by email when ready. The wicked_pdf gem uses an instance of https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf under the hood. This causes problems because it can only generate pdfs one by one. The solution would probably be having a dedicated service that would orchestrate multiple wkhtmltopdf instances.

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?

I used this package for a while to generate the PDF from HTML - https://github.com/rdvojmoc/DinkToPdf

This may not be applicable in your situation, but I'll leave this info here anyways. I used DinkToPdf https://github.com/rdvojmoc/DinkToPdf for a Blazor Server and a Blazor WASM OMS application. I created a 'Reports' controller, created two different controller action methods. One to create the HTML for the PDF and the other to actually generate the PDF.

The install instructions for DinkToPdf (see github) have a step about installing native binaries that your tutorial seems to be missing.