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Show HN: Htmldocs – Typeset and generate pdfs with HTML/CSS

htmldocs.com

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Re: Show HN: Htmldocs – Typeset and generate pdfs with HTML/CSS

#32

Post by amcaskill »

This looks awesome, congratulations.

I think you’re onto something here.

I work on an OSS reporting and analytics tool (https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence) and the amount of time and effort that goes into a really good “print pdf”, and how valuable people find it, has been one of the more surprising parts of the project to me.

Re: Show HN: Htmldocs – Typeset and generate pdfs with HTML/CSS

#35

Post by V__ »

__jonas wrote: post #5
karteum wrote: post #3

Some people might be interested in https://weasyprint.org/

Interesting, I'm looking for a solution to render PDFs at the moment, it looks like that one actually does not use chromium, unlike most tools that I've seen that render HTML to PDFs. What's the advantage? Is it more lightweight / faster / reliable?

Depending on your needs, Typst might be what you are looking for.

[1] https://github.com/typst/typst

Re: Show HN: Htmldocs – Typeset and generate pdfs with HTML/CSS

#36

Post by twobitshifter »

tagyro wrote: post #26

Great project and great work! I had a similar itch to scratch and I found quarto ( https://quarto.org/ ) - free, open-source and doesn’t depend on chrome (admittedly it has other dependencies, but at least not chrome).

quarto is just using pandoc behind the scenes

Re: Show HN: Htmldocs – Typeset and generate pdfs with HTML/CSS

#38

Post by lelanthran »

cubefox wrote: post #29

See also native CSS support for paged media: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-page-3/ When I looked into it several years ago, browser support for some critical features wasn't there yet. Not sure whether this has improved. In principle, this would be a great alternative to proprietary PDF rendering libraries which require you to design your document completely in (e.g. Java) code, and to the typical LaTeX approach. You rea…

I dunno about that.

For simple stuff, sure HTML and CSS is great, but when I want something print-perfect I use LaTeX.

A simple table in LaTeX is no harder than in HTML, assuming the same level of knowledge in the tool.

But then when you throw in a simple requirement like "left margins on even pages and right margins on odd pages need to be larger", HTML becomes hell to work in.

HTML and CSS, even with a media query for print, sucks.

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