5 ms·

BreezyPDF Lite: HTML to PDF generation as a Service

66 points by deedubaya 8y ago

jacquesm 8y ago
PDF is 'lossy' when compared to HTML, you will lose a ton of semantic information, and on top of that the resulting PDF will be much larger than the source material. I'm currently involved in an effort to do the reverse and there isn't a day that I don't curse the PDF specification and the various implementations. And with the 'data:' source for graphical element and MathJax there isn't much reason for for instance scientific papers to be published as pdfs to begin with. https://github.com/thomaspark/pubcss https://github.com/thomaspark/pubcss PubCSS has the right idea.
- sebazzz 8y ago
  Convert to PDF can be very useful for generating reports. For instance, you display a chart using Javascript, and get exactly the same chart in the generated report. We use EvoPDF for this purpose, which also uses a website based webbrowser under the covers. Unfortunately it is quite slow, especially when Javascript is required for the report. It also handles tables badly across multiple pages, and full page backgrounds are also cumbersome.
  - simooooo 8y ago
    It also brings along a 50mb dll for the ride
- invaliduser 8y ago
  PDF is a format designed for the exact display of documents, not for anything else. It's like ranting about your printer losing all those html tags semantic when printing a web page. The pdf format is not to blame here.
- contravariant 8y ago
  There's a pretty good reason for scientific papers to be published in PDF. First of all TeX was originally designed to work with PostScript which was intended for communication to printers, so the step to PDF was easy to make, second of all PDF has had fairly broad support and unambiguous representation for longer than HTML has (and even though HTML appearance is now somewhat standardised it's still nowhere near as stable as PDF has been).
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    PDF stable? The only party that properly renders PDFs is the one that came up with the format, it's as bad as Microsoft Word in terms of interop. That it is a supposedly open format is a joke, there is so much old cruft in there that you could implement if you had access to Adobe's source code but unfortunately nobody but Adobe does. PostScript (which PDF is a restricted version of in many ways) is clean, but PDF is not.
    - simooooo 8y ago
      Having implemented a text selection algorithm for pdf files. I hate the format now
mapgrep 8y ago
I am guessing the API/service architecure is what differentiates it from the command line tool https://wkhtmltopdf.org/ https://wkhtmltopdf.org/ ?
- deedubaya 8y ago
  Wkhtmltopdf uses webkit, and at last check, an ancient version of WebKit at that. This uses Google Chrome headless for the actual PDF generation.
- forgot-my-pw 8y ago
  WKHTMLTOPDF is pretty inactive nowadays. It uses an older webkit engine, and there's only been 1 release in the past 2 years (which happened to be 19 days ago, actually).
nightbrawler 8y ago
Despite being a bit pricey, PrinceXML is the best tool I've seen and used for HTML to PDF conversion. Massive set of features and very reliable output. We've used it as part of our reporting engine to output PDF's since 2011. Supports spanning tables across multiple pages, JavaScript, image loading and lots of other cool stuff
- Scarbutt 8y ago
  Prince renders HTML somewhat different than browsers and doesn't support the latest HTML + CSS standards, why choose it for new stuff over headless chrome and/or puppeteer?
  - wolfgang42 8y ago
    I use PrinceXML at work, for generating press-ready output. (E.g. a catalog, generated straight from the product database and ready to be sent to the printer. Previously they were doing this all manually with PageMaker, which was very tedious and prone to mistakes.) It supports the CSS Paged Media spec, so you have full control over page layout: margins, widows and orphans, page breaks, bleeds, and so on. It also understands page numbers, and gives you full control over headers and footers. Other things it supports include press crop marks, color management, and PDF options like bookmarks and PDF link regions. Headless browser rendering is fine if all you need is a two-page invoice PDF, but it falls down when you need control of anything other than basic stuff like the font size.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - deedubaya 8y ago
      > it falls down when you need control of anything other than basic stuff like the font size This is definitely not the case anymore, and BreezyPDFLite supports most of the features you mention, while supporting the same HTML/CSS/JS you might be displaying to end users across evergreen browsers.
deedubaya 8y ago
Turns html like this: https://github.com/danielwestendorf/breezy_pdf_lite-ruby/blob/master/example/ex.html https://github.com/danielwestendorf/breezy_pdf_lite-ruby/blo... Into a pdf like this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/v4j4n1cvtm032w9/breezy-pdf-dashboard-example.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/v4j4n1cvtm032w9/breezy-pdf-dashboa...
- radiusK 8y ago
  Very impressive. I wonder how it got the div heights to fit perfectly with the PDF page height. Was it tweaked a lot to fit or the flexbox just magically fill to the page following the page break rule?
- brendandahl 8y ago
  And it all comes back to HTML as dropbox uses pdf.js to show that PDF.
  - deedubaya 8y ago
    The circle is complete
cygned 8y ago
We have built something similar internally. Macroservice running a cluster of headless Chromes that turn an uploaded HTML file into a PDF. Used for reporting. We now switch to a Microsoft Word rendering backend where we process Word files with template strings in them and then run Word in headless mode to save files as PDFs. While the HTML-to-PDF approach works, most of our users work with Word all day so we are solving the wrong problem.
- wilsonfiifi 8y ago
  Can you elaborate a bit more on your Word based reporting? To date the only solution i've been satisfied with is Aspose Words. Unfortunately licensing is a bit steep so it would be good to know if any cheaper options are available.
  - cygned 8y ago
    We basically process the template with a node.js library. We then have a node.js server on a Windows machine that takes a file, saves it onto disk and runs a Visual Basic application on it which itself starts Microsoft Word headless to save the file as PDF.
    - benbristow 8y ago
      > runs a Visual Basic application on it Clever, but that does sound a bit messy.
      - cygned 8y ago
        Sounds messy. However, this VB app is literally just 15 LOC, pretty straightforward. And it is the only solution we have found so far that allows us to leverage Word.
jim-a-1020401 8y ago
I've been working on a documentation process with Markdown -> HTML + CSS -> PDF for a while and I found that Weasyprint works best. It supports everything I need except CSS target-counter for auto-generation of page numbers in a TOC but otherwise really good. I really don't like that this uses something non-standard for header/footer and stuff in the margins since that's already covered by standardized CSS @page stuff; https://www.w3.org/TR/css-gcpm-3/ https://www.w3.org/TR/css-gcpm-3/. I'm using that with Weasyprint for automatic header/footers with auto page-numbering, including setting strings from the html to use for heading names, document title, author, etc... example CSS: `h1 { string-set: h1-title content(), h2-title ""; }` + `@page { @bottom-left {content: string(h1-title) string(h2-title);}`. Weasyprint seems closest to princexml and is free.
- deedubaya 8y ago
  You can use CSS page sizing as well, passing it via meta isn't required. https://docs.breezypdf.com/metadata#use-css-for-page-size https://docs.breezypdf.com/metadata#use-css-for-page-size Headers/and footers are just HTML strings and can be super rich with images etc and customized with CSS. Page numbering is free as well in headers/footers. Of course you could just use properly positioned <header> and <footer> tags and do whatever you need to with JS for page numbering.
  - jim-a-1020401 8y ago
    That's good for page sizing but as other comments on this thread noted, no browsers seem to have proper support for CSS paged media including Chrome. When I tested it, none of the @bottom type stuff or other print/page related CSS worked at all which is why I ended up with Weasyprint since it has it's own engine (and is really great). Example of some more paged media stuff not supported by Chrome; https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/01/designing-for-print-with-css/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/01/designing-for-print.... Another thing Weasyprint does really well which surprised me is automatically carrying over table headers onto subsequent pages when a table is split across pages, which is really nice.
- oliwarner 8y ago
laktek 8y ago
If you like a hosted API, I've built https://pdf.cool https://pdf.cool
- deedubaya 8y ago
  Or BreezyPDF.com ;)
nicolasMLV 8y ago
It is mainly a wrapper around this chrome headless command : (maybe you only need that) `#{chrome_alias} --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf="#{pdf_path}" "#{html_url}"`

66 points by deedubaya 8y ago

PDF is 'lossy' when compared to HTML, you will lose a ton of semantic information, and on top of that the resulting PDF will be much larger than the source material. I'm currently involved in an effort to do the reverse and there isn't a day that I don't curse the PDF specification and the various implementations. And with the 'data:' source for graphical element and MathJax there isn't much reason for for instance scientific papers to be published as pdfs to begin with. https://github.com/thomaspark/pubcss https://github.com/thomaspark/pubcss PubCSS has the right idea.

sebazzz 8y ago
Convert to PDF can be very useful for generating reports. For instance, you display a chart using Javascript, and get exactly the same chart in the generated report. We use EvoPDF for this purpose, which also uses a website based webbrowser under the covers. Unfortunately it is quite slow, especially when Javascript is required for the report. It also handles tables badly across multiple pages, and full page backgrounds are also cumbersome.
- simooooo 8y ago
  It also brings along a 50mb dll for the ride
invaliduser 8y ago
PDF is a format designed for the exact display of documents, not for anything else. It's like ranting about your printer losing all those html tags semantic when printing a web page. The pdf format is not to blame here.
contravariant 8y ago
There's a pretty good reason for scientific papers to be published in PDF. First of all TeX was originally designed to work with PostScript which was intended for communication to printers, so the step to PDF was easy to make, second of all PDF has had fairly broad support and unambiguous representation for longer than HTML has (and even though HTML appearance is now somewhat standardised it's still nowhere near as stable as PDF has been).
- jacquesm 8y ago
  PDF stable? The only party that properly renders PDFs is the one that came up with the format, it's as bad as Microsoft Word in terms of interop. That it is a supposedly open format is a joke, there is so much old cruft in there that you could implement if you had access to Adobe's source code but unfortunately nobody but Adobe does. PostScript (which PDF is a restricted version of in many ways) is clean, but PDF is not.
  - simooooo 8y ago
    Having implemented a text selection algorithm for pdf files. I hate the format now

mapgrep 8y ago

I am guessing the API/service architecure is what differentiates it from the command line tool https://wkhtmltopdf.org/ https://wkhtmltopdf.org/ ?

deedubaya 8y ago
Wkhtmltopdf uses webkit, and at last check, an ancient version of WebKit at that. This uses Google Chrome headless for the actual PDF generation.
forgot-my-pw 8y ago
WKHTMLTOPDF is pretty inactive nowadays. It uses an older webkit engine, and there's only been 1 release in the past 2 years (which happened to be 19 days ago, actually).

nightbrawler 8y ago

Despite being a bit pricey, PrinceXML is the best tool I've seen and used for HTML to PDF conversion. Massive set of features and very reliable output. We've used it as part of our reporting engine to output PDF's since 2011. Supports spanning tables across multiple pages, JavaScript, image loading and lots of other cool stuff

Scarbutt 8y ago
Prince renders HTML somewhat different than browsers and doesn't support the latest HTML + CSS standards, why choose it for new stuff over headless chrome and/or puppeteer?
- wolfgang42 8y ago
  I use PrinceXML at work, for generating press-ready output. (E.g. a catalog, generated straight from the product database and ready to be sent to the printer. Previously they were doing this all manually with PageMaker, which was very tedious and prone to mistakes.) It supports the CSS Paged Media spec, so you have full control over page layout: margins, widows and orphans, page breaks, bleeds, and so on. It also understands page numbers, and gives you full control over headers and footers. Other things it supports include press crop marks, color management, and PDF options like bookmarks and PDF link regions. Headless browser rendering is fine if all you need is a two-page invoice PDF, but it falls down when you need control of anything other than basic stuff like the font size.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - deedubaya 8y ago
    > it falls down when you need control of anything other than basic stuff like the font size This is definitely not the case anymore, and BreezyPDFLite supports most of the features you mention, while supporting the same HTML/CSS/JS you might be displaying to end users across evergreen browsers.

deedubaya 8y ago

Turns html like this: https://github.com/danielwestendorf/breezy_pdf_lite-ruby/blob/master/example/ex.html https://github.com/danielwestendorf/breezy_pdf_lite-ruby/blo... Into a pdf like this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/v4j4n1cvtm032w9/breezy-pdf-dashboard-example.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/v4j4n1cvtm032w9/breezy-pdf-dashboa...

radiusK 8y ago
Very impressive. I wonder how it got the div heights to fit perfectly with the PDF page height. Was it tweaked a lot to fit or the flexbox just magically fill to the page following the page break rule?
brendandahl 8y ago
And it all comes back to HTML as dropbox uses pdf.js to show that PDF.
- deedubaya 8y ago
  The circle is complete

cygned 8y ago

We have built something similar internally. Macroservice running a cluster of headless Chromes that turn an uploaded HTML file into a PDF. Used for reporting. We now switch to a Microsoft Word rendering backend where we process Word files with template strings in them and then run Word in headless mode to save files as PDFs. While the HTML-to-PDF approach works, most of our users work with Word all day so we are solving the wrong problem.

wilsonfiifi 8y ago
Can you elaborate a bit more on your Word based reporting? To date the only solution i've been satisfied with is Aspose Words. Unfortunately licensing is a bit steep so it would be good to know if any cheaper options are available.
- cygned 8y ago
  We basically process the template with a node.js library. We then have a node.js server on a Windows machine that takes a file, saves it onto disk and runs a Visual Basic application on it which itself starts Microsoft Word headless to save the file as PDF.
  - benbristow 8y ago
    > runs a Visual Basic application on it Clever, but that does sound a bit messy.
    - cygned 8y ago
      Sounds messy. However, this VB app is literally just 15 LOC, pretty straightforward. And it is the only solution we have found so far that allows us to leverage Word.

jim-a-1020401 8y ago

I've been working on a documentation process with Markdown -> HTML + CSS -> PDF for a while and I found that Weasyprint works best. It supports everything I need except CSS target-counter for auto-generation of page numbers in a TOC but otherwise really good. I really don't like that this uses something non-standard for header/footer and stuff in the margins since that's already covered by standardized CSS @page stuff; https://www.w3.org/TR/css-gcpm-3/ https://www.w3.org/TR/css-gcpm-3/. I'm using that with Weasyprint for automatic header/footers with auto page-numbering, including setting strings from the html to use for heading names, document title, author, etc... example CSS: `h1 { string-set: h1-title content(), h2-title ""; }` + `@page { @bottom-left {content: string(h1-title) string(h2-title);}`. Weasyprint seems closest to princexml and is free.

deedubaya 8y ago
You can use CSS page sizing as well, passing it via meta isn't required. https://docs.breezypdf.com/metadata#use-css-for-page-size https://docs.breezypdf.com/metadata#use-css-for-page-size Headers/and footers are just HTML strings and can be super rich with images etc and customized with CSS. Page numbering is free as well in headers/footers. Of course you could just use properly positioned <header> and <footer> tags and do whatever you need to with JS for page numbering.
- jim-a-1020401 8y ago
  That's good for page sizing but as other comments on this thread noted, no browsers seem to have proper support for CSS paged media including Chrome. When I tested it, none of the @bottom type stuff or other print/page related CSS worked at all which is why I ended up with Weasyprint since it has it's own engine (and is really great). Example of some more paged media stuff not supported by Chrome; https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/01/designing-for-print-with-css/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/01/designing-for-print.... Another thing Weasyprint does really well which surprised me is automatically carrying over table headers onto subsequent pages when a table is split across pages, which is really nice.
oliwarner 8y ago

laktek 8y ago

If you like a hosted API, I've built https://pdf.cool https://pdf.cool

deedubaya 8y ago
Or BreezyPDF.com ;)

nicolasMLV 8y ago

It is mainly a wrapper around this chrome headless command : (maybe you only need that) `#{chrome_alias} --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf="#{pdf_path}" "#{html_url}"`