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Wkhtmltopdf is based on QtWebkit which is long deprecated. There was work to move it QtWebEngine but doesn't seem to be going anywhere: https://wkhtmltopdf.org/

Wkhtmltopdf is based on QtWebkit which is long deprecated. There was work to move it QtWebEngine but doesn't seem to be going anywhere: https://wkhtmltopdf.org/status.html https://wkhtmltopdf.org/status.html In the meantime Chrome added headless support and with command line or puppeteer you can do the same thing with a much newer and more secure engine. However if you need full CSS-Paged support then PrinceXML is probably your only option and its not cheap: https://www.princexml.com https://www.princexml.com

abhinav22 6y ago
There is a cheap alternative to Prince called DocRaptor which uses the prince engine but is pay per use Basically prince adds a watermark on the first page - so you do all your revisions and then only pay for the final copy to remove the watermark (however as any editor would know, we always have many final, final final, final v3 versions ;) so paying for prince once-off at 500$ is probably the best way for anyone who needs professional pdfing. I wrote a latex / markdown / html editor with a simple mechanism (using the browsers default print settings), I think it’s not too bad for those looking to pdf from html: https://writer.math.dev https://writer.math.dev Issue with mine is you would have to do all style sheets in line. I would recommend serious users to either pay for Prince if they want header/footer/page number control or just use print style sheets and code the html / css themselves and use headless chrome or chrome itself to print. Many people want JavaScript in their pages, I can’t recall if headless chrome can correctly account for that. File > print is the best imo :)
blowski 6y ago
Despite have a deprecated dependency, is there any issue using wkhtmltopdf? I'm running it in quite a few projects to generate letters and invoices, and not experiencing any issues.
- ognarb 6y ago
  if it works for you and you control the html/css/js that is rendered, I don't think there is any problem.
- daniellarusso 6y ago
  I have run into issues where it would incorrectly render svg tags.
  - blowski 6y ago
    That's interesting - have you got any more detail on that?
    - daniellarusso 6y ago
      Yes, so there was a page of a report that showed a ‘top-view’ illustration of an item, and this svg would indicate where along the exterior of this item had damage, and where it has no damage. So, it would become fairly inaccurate using wkhtmltopdf. It would look like either the entire item had no issues, or it had sustained damage everywhere.
      - blowski 6y ago
        Thanks, that's good to know.
- fvdessen 6y ago
  We were generating hundred of thousands of pdfs per day with wkhtmltopdf and had a lot of reliability issues. We switched to prince, and it has proven much better on all levels; no more crashes, better layout, smaller pdfs, faster generation, etc.
  - bckr 6y ago
    Can you share any more about why you would need to generate so many PDFs from HTML?
    - CodesInChaos 6y ago
      We generate invoice PDFs from templated html using wkhtmltopdf. For B2C applications hitting millions of invoices per month is quite possible. There are reliability problems with wkhtmltopdf, but it's possible to make it reasonably reliable with enough error detection and retrying.
      - bckr 6y ago
        Thanks, that makes sense now.
endless1234 6y ago
> In the meantime Chrome added headless support and with command line or puppeteer you can do the same thing with a much newer and more secure engine. Yep, this is the way to go now. Very simple API with puppeteer and everything looks the same as when viewing the page in a browser (save any @media print css).
- Guillaume86 6y ago
  FYI you can use the chrome dev tools to set the @media to print, great to fine tune your CSS for PDF rendering or just printing.
casperb 6y ago
We use wkhtmltopdf and it works fine for us. But I would like better support for newer CSS. I like the functionality from Chrome to use it headless, but my main problem with it is that text is not selectable in the rendered PDF. It seems to be an screencapture as image or something. Anyone has this working? Selectable text is really needed for generating PDF invoices.
- SigmundA 6y ago
  Chrome definitely does not render text or other vectors like SVG as an image. I just tried printing the Hacker News front page to PDF in Edge which is the same engine as Chrome and the text was selectable.
  - infensus 6y ago
    Most of the time. I'm using Chrome via Puppeteer to generate PDF reports, and I've seen certain CSS rules make it render pages (or parts of them) as images. One of them was `transform` I think.
    - SigmundA 6y ago
      Yes transform may rasterize the content in order to transform it say as a GPU operation this is regardless of printing, this will be noticeable as blurry text and vectors on HiDpi displays.
- igeligel_dev 6y ago
  It might be related on how you include fonts, I have seen a lot of weird behaviors unfortunately with that. Especially this response of an issue was important for my team: https://github.com/puppeteer/puppeteer/issues/422#issuecomment-380844283 https://github.com/puppeteer/puppeteer/issues/422#issuecomme... Source: working on automatic PDF reporting in my current company.
- majkinetor 6y ago
  > text is not selectable Here is reproducible demo that is selectable and clickable (links): - https://majkinetor.github.io/mm-docs-template/docs.pdf https://majkinetor.github.io/mm-docs-template/docs.pdf This is done using puppetear. The same can be achieved by Save as PDF in chrome of single page containing entire site: - https://majkinetor.github.io/mm-docs-template/print_page/ https://majkinetor.github.io/mm-docs-template/print_page/ This is all part of my mm-docs framework: - https://majkinetor.github.io/mm-docs-template https://majkinetor.github.io/mm-docs-template
Guillaume86 6y ago
In my limited experience, the only thing I miss in chrome headless compared to commercial PDF to HTML tools is "smarter" page breaks support, aka avoid mostly empty pages. I already tried to fill in a bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=953313#c11 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=953313... but the spec is not very clear nor requires the most compact arrangement possible. It would probably be a worthy addition to the spec even just for the environmental impact (limiting number of pages when printing).
- josefx 6y ago
  What I mostly miss from browsers is page numbering support. As far as I remember there is a standard but only a few commercial tools actually support it.
  - Guillaume86 6y ago
    You can try to polyfill that with something like https://github.com/pagedjs/pagedjs https://github.com/pagedjs/pagedjs
    - josefx 6y ago
      Interesting, that seems to do what I was missing.
ognarb 6y ago
Instead of princexml, there is an open source alternative: https://www.pagedjs.org/ https://www.pagedjs.org/. I saw a demo in 2019 at the libregraphicsmeeting and it was really nice and worked well for most browser already. It probably improved since then.
wolfi1 6y ago
flyingsaucer [1] is also an option. [1] https://github.com/flyingsaucerproject/flyingsaucer https://github.com/flyingsaucerproject/flyingsaucer
machiaweliczny 6y ago
paged.js embeding seems to work fine
russianbandit 6y ago
There’s also pdfreactor.com which we use to get full support of CSS.

abhinav22 6y ago

There is a cheap alternative to Prince called DocRaptor which uses the prince engine but is pay per use Basically prince adds a watermark on the first page - so you do all your revisions and then only pay for the final copy to remove the watermark (however as any editor would know, we always have many final, final final, final v3 versions ;) so paying for prince once-off at 500$ is probably the best way for anyone who needs professional pdfing. I wrote a latex / markdown / html editor with a simple mechanism (using the browsers default print settings), I think it’s not too bad for those looking to pdf from html: https://writer.math.dev https://writer.math.dev Issue with mine is you would have to do all style sheets in line. I would recommend serious users to either pay for Prince if they want header/footer/page number control or just use print style sheets and code the html / css themselves and use headless chrome or chrome itself to print. Many people want JavaScript in their pages, I can’t recall if headless chrome can correctly account for that. File > print is the best imo :)

blowski 6y ago

Despite have a deprecated dependency, is there any issue using wkhtmltopdf? I'm running it in quite a few projects to generate letters and invoices, and not experiencing any issues.

ognarb 6y ago
if it works for you and you control the html/css/js that is rendered, I don't think there is any problem.
daniellarusso 6y ago
I have run into issues where it would incorrectly render svg tags.
- blowski 6y ago
  That's interesting - have you got any more detail on that?
  - daniellarusso 6y ago
    Yes, so there was a page of a report that showed a ‘top-view’ illustration of an item, and this svg would indicate where along the exterior of this item had damage, and where it has no damage. So, it would become fairly inaccurate using wkhtmltopdf. It would look like either the entire item had no issues, or it had sustained damage everywhere.
    - blowski 6y ago
      Thanks, that's good to know.
fvdessen 6y ago
We were generating hundred of thousands of pdfs per day with wkhtmltopdf and had a lot of reliability issues. We switched to prince, and it has proven much better on all levels; no more crashes, better layout, smaller pdfs, faster generation, etc.
- bckr 6y ago
  Can you share any more about why you would need to generate so many PDFs from HTML?
  - CodesInChaos 6y ago
    We generate invoice PDFs from templated html using wkhtmltopdf. For B2C applications hitting millions of invoices per month is quite possible. There are reliability problems with wkhtmltopdf, but it's possible to make it reasonably reliable with enough error detection and retrying.
    - bckr 6y ago
      Thanks, that makes sense now.

endless1234 6y ago

> In the meantime Chrome added headless support and with command line or puppeteer you can do the same thing with a much newer and more secure engine. Yep, this is the way to go now. Very simple API with puppeteer and everything looks the same as when viewing the page in a browser (save any @media print css).

Guillaume86 6y ago
FYI you can use the chrome dev tools to set the @media to print, great to fine tune your CSS for PDF rendering or just printing.

casperb 6y ago

We use wkhtmltopdf and it works fine for us. But I would like better support for newer CSS. I like the functionality from Chrome to use it headless, but my main problem with it is that text is not selectable in the rendered PDF. It seems to be an screencapture as image or something. Anyone has this working? Selectable text is really needed for generating PDF invoices.

SigmundA 6y ago
Chrome definitely does not render text or other vectors like SVG as an image. I just tried printing the Hacker News front page to PDF in Edge which is the same engine as Chrome and the text was selectable.
- infensus 6y ago
  Most of the time. I'm using Chrome via Puppeteer to generate PDF reports, and I've seen certain CSS rules make it render pages (or parts of them) as images. One of them was `transform` I think.
  - SigmundA 6y ago
    Yes transform may rasterize the content in order to transform it say as a GPU operation this is regardless of printing, this will be noticeable as blurry text and vectors on HiDpi displays.
igeligel_dev 6y ago
It might be related on how you include fonts, I have seen a lot of weird behaviors unfortunately with that. Especially this response of an issue was important for my team: https://github.com/puppeteer/puppeteer/issues/422#issuecomment-380844283 https://github.com/puppeteer/puppeteer/issues/422#issuecomme... Source: working on automatic PDF reporting in my current company.
majkinetor 6y ago
> text is not selectable Here is reproducible demo that is selectable and clickable (links): - https://majkinetor.github.io/mm-docs-template/docs.pdf https://majkinetor.github.io/mm-docs-template/docs.pdf This is done using puppetear. The same can be achieved by Save as PDF in chrome of single page containing entire site: - https://majkinetor.github.io/mm-docs-template/print_page/ https://majkinetor.github.io/mm-docs-template/print_page/ This is all part of my mm-docs framework: - https://majkinetor.github.io/mm-docs-template https://majkinetor.github.io/mm-docs-template

Guillaume86 6y ago

In my limited experience, the only thing I miss in chrome headless compared to commercial PDF to HTML tools is "smarter" page breaks support, aka avoid mostly empty pages. I already tried to fill in a bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=953313#c11 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=953313... but the spec is not very clear nor requires the most compact arrangement possible. It would probably be a worthy addition to the spec even just for the environmental impact (limiting number of pages when printing).

josefx 6y ago
What I mostly miss from browsers is page numbering support. As far as I remember there is a standard but only a few commercial tools actually support it.
- Guillaume86 6y ago
  You can try to polyfill that with something like https://github.com/pagedjs/pagedjs https://github.com/pagedjs/pagedjs
  - josefx 6y ago
    Interesting, that seems to do what I was missing.

ognarb 6y ago

Instead of princexml, there is an open source alternative: https://www.pagedjs.org/ https://www.pagedjs.org/. I saw a demo in 2019 at the libregraphicsmeeting and it was really nice and worked well for most browser already. It probably improved since then.

wolfi1 6y ago

flyingsaucer [1] is also an option. [1] https://github.com/flyingsaucerproject/flyingsaucer https://github.com/flyingsaucerproject/flyingsaucer

machiaweliczny 6y ago

paged.js embeding seems to work fine

russianbandit 6y ago

There’s also pdfreactor.com which we use to get full support of CSS.