WKHTMLToPDF VS mdBook

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?

Since the srd uses standardized links (base/creature type/creature name) you could make a list of urls based on your selected monsters in a spreadsheet, then use a program like https://wkhtmltopdf.org/, https://www.weenysoft.com/free-html-to-pdf-converter.html, or the url conversion feature in Adobe Acrobat Pro if you combine all the urls into an htm for Acrobat to pull from.

I'm responsible for a number of Java products. I try to provide high-quality Javadoc for all public library interfaces, library user's guides where appropriate, and development guides for applications. The latter two take the form of MDBook documents (https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/), with the document source living in the GitHub repo so that it's tied to the particular software release in a natural way.

My org has used mdBook: https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/ (That link is itself a rendered mdBook, so that'll give you an idea of the feature set.)

(While it's definitely a Rust "thing", if you just have a set of .md files, all you need is a "SUMMARY.md" (which contains the ToC) and a small config file; i.e., you don't have to have any Rust code to use it, and it works fine without. We document a large, mostly non-Rust codebase with it.)

If you want the lowest friction, open source, easily extensible Markdown to Web, Kindle, PDF, etc. tool, highly recommend mdBook: https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook it’s written in Rust, but you don’t have to know any Rust to use it. And then wing is all CSS; for which there are many good (free) themes.

Interesting enough there seems to be an open PR for that: https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook/pull/1918