Job Adventures - PDF generation | Jun 2024

• Wicked Pdf

  7 3,531 6.4 Ruby

  PDF generator (from HTML) plugin for Ruby on Rails

  My first contact with building PDFs was with rails using https://github.com/mileszs/wicked_pdf. The task always seems easy, you just build HTML and render that to pdf. And in fact, the part of rendering the info to the pdf is easy. The nightmare comes when implementing what is on the mockups. How will CSS behave in printing mode? What if we have a component that can’t split on a page break, it should jump in its entirety to the next page? What if our cover page does not count to the page total? What if the cover page does not have an header/footer? Why is the pdf so big?

• Scout Monitoring

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  Performance metrics and, now, Logs Management Monitoring with Scout Monitoring. Get early access to Scout Monitoring's NEW Ruby logging feature [beta] by signing up now. Start for free and enable logs to get better insights into your Rails apps.

  

• WKHTMLToPDF

  57 12,952 4.3 C++

  Discontinued Convert HTML to PDF using Webkit (QtWebKit)

  

  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.

• gotenberg

  55 7,669 9.0 Go

  A developer-friendly API for converting numerous document formats into PDF files, and more!

  

  After some searching, I found https://github.com/gotenberg/gotenberg. It ticked a lot of boxes.

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