WKHTMLToPDF VS tectonic

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.

You may want to try https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic, which downloads files from TeXLive on-demand.

v2 has improved TeX engine lookup, improved PDF template look&feel, proper support for MS Windows (where it comes integrated with the Tectonic engine) and a few more new features.

There's https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic but I think the issue with that idea is that sure, you can re-implement TeX (it's sufficiently simple) in Rust and then run LaTeX packages on top of it, but then you're back to LaTeX and all its weirdness so you haven't really gained anything compared to LaTeX itself.

In terms of TeX, I would recommend taking a look at tectonic, a self-contained TeX distribution that auto-installs packages you need when you need them, and “just works” when you call the binary to compile… Because screw messing around with package managers, CTAN and XeTeX. I’ve been using it for around a year and it’s so much easier than any other TeX distribution.

For example, you can have your main application in something like Deno/Node/python that acts as a server, and then delegate the actual pdf generation to tectonic (https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic) or Typst https://typst.app/blog/2023/beta-oss-launch/

tectonic: https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic

How does it compare with Tectonic?

It's sad that Tectonic conversion to Rust[1] was never finished. For now it's just a wrapper around C and C++ code. By far, it was the most promising thing in this distribution.

[1] https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/issues/459

The only thing I've seen is https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic but that's an actual re-implementation of TeX Rust.