3 ms·

How does this compare to wkhtmltopdf, which, IIRC, uses WebKit to render the pdf?

by igitur 9y ago

esbenp 9y ago
We actually used wkhtmltopdf before we started using pdf-bot. wkhtmltopdf development has slowed a lot, it is very unstable and you need to run a 2 year old alpha version to support flexbox (if I remember correctly) :-) headless chrome is a lot more stable choice imo.
- bshimmin 9y ago
  We had an absolutely ghastly time last year trying to implement wkhtmltopdf in a Rails app - we probably wasted an entire week fighting with both Wicked PDF and PDFKit before we just gave up and wrote something using Prawn instead (which was, of course, extremely time-consuming in a different way, but at least the end result was good).
  - boundlessdreamz 9y ago
    What problems did you run into with wkhtmltopdf? We have been using it without much trouble. Chrome pdf generation is nice but wkhtmltopdf generates smaller PDFs with table of contents.
    - bshimmin 9y ago
      All kinds of problems that others have mentioned above, plus in terms of the Rails integration, it felt like we hit almost every one of the open issues on the GitHub repos for both Wicked PDF and PDFKit. I vaguely recall fonts in production being a problem, a general lack of reliability, performance issues, fiddling around with various different binaries of wkhtmltopdf to find one that maybe worked... probably other things besides. It was a bad week and I wish I hadn't reminded myself! (With no disrespect, of course, to the authors of these libraries - they just didn't work well for us.)
shimon_e 9y ago
Buggy as hell. Doesn't render things as expected. I'm using headless chrome for pdf generation internally and couldn't be happier. I directly call chrome from the command line it couldn't be simpler. I don't know why people need all these wrappers.
kyriakos 9y ago
as far as I know wkhtmltopdf still exceeds in some aspects, better page control, margins, headers, footers and tables of contents. chrome still doesn't support them and also no browser supports CSS Paged Media which allows for setting up running elements like page numbering etc

How does this compare to wkhtmltopdf, which, IIRC, uses WebKit to render the pdf?

by igitur 9y ago

How does this compare to wkhtmltopdf, which, IIRC, uses WebKit to render the pdf?

We actually used wkhtmltopdf before we started using pdf-bot. wkhtmltopdf development has slowed a lot, it is very unstable and you need to run a 2 year old alpha version to support flexbox (if I remember correctly) :-) headless chrome is a lot more stable choice imo.

bshimmin 9y ago
We had an absolutely ghastly time last year trying to implement wkhtmltopdf in a Rails app - we probably wasted an entire week fighting with both Wicked PDF and PDFKit before we just gave up and wrote something using Prawn instead (which was, of course, extremely time-consuming in a different way, but at least the end result was good).
- boundlessdreamz 9y ago
  What problems did you run into with wkhtmltopdf? We have been using it without much trouble. Chrome pdf generation is nice but wkhtmltopdf generates smaller PDFs with table of contents.
  - bshimmin 9y ago
    All kinds of problems that others have mentioned above, plus in terms of the Rails integration, it felt like we hit almost every one of the open issues on the GitHub repos for both Wicked PDF and PDFKit. I vaguely recall fonts in production being a problem, a general lack of reliability, performance issues, fiddling around with various different binaries of wkhtmltopdf to find one that maybe worked... probably other things besides. It was a bad week and I wish I hadn't reminded myself! (With no disrespect, of course, to the authors of these libraries - they just didn't work well for us.)

shimon_e 9y ago

Buggy as hell. Doesn't render things as expected. I'm using headless chrome for pdf generation internally and couldn't be happier. I directly call chrome from the command line it couldn't be simpler. I don't know why people need all these wrappers.

kyriakos 9y ago

as far as I know wkhtmltopdf still exceeds in some aspects, better page control, margins, headers, footers and tables of contents. chrome still doesn't support them and also no browser supports CSS Paged Media which allows for setting up running elements like page numbering etc