Show HN: Htmldocs – Typeset and generate pdfs with HTML/CSS • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by svsaraf » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 2:48 PM UTC

kelvinzhang wrote: post #80

QuiCasseRien wrote: post #67

@kelvinzhang Quite frankly, htmldocs is the exact project i'm looking for months. I'm tired of word and same alternative and wanted something i can write html and css3 to convert to PDF. You do and in a beautiful way ! Some question : i just want to use your product be also need to be sure my doc will by avaivable in futur. what's your plan ? - opensource ? - community/enterprise ? - close source but a docker version…

The long term goal of this project is to make HTML/CSS the defacto way of typesetting PDF documents. I’ll definitely keep it running for as long as I can. The web version is just the initial step, and will likely open source for people who want to self-host and to increase adoption. For pricing, will probably adopt a model similar to Overleaf where it’s free for most users and maybe charge for team collaboration or h…

If you do opensource it, happy to help maintain it. This product would be helpful for my (fledgling) company, but would need to be self-hosted (use case is esignatures)

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

#92

Post by chrisfinazzo » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 3:15 PM UTC

lelanthran wrote: post #85

chrisfinazzo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once I had the chance to move away from Word, TeX was the first place I went. That said, I eventually tired of the obtuse error messages and felt I was making things more complicated for no real gain. Even keeping a BasicTex environment working requires effort that HTML does not.

> That said, I eventually tired of the obtuse error messages and felt I was making things more complicated for no real gain. The error messages are pretty poor. > Even keeping a BasicTex environment working requires effort that HTML does not. I've been told, by Mac and Winodws users, that it's a pain. Personally I've never had to download extra packages/styles directly on Debian. Performing `apt-get install tex- ` no…

I solved the issue by installing manually, but even that is a pain with TeX Live - some of the directory tree needed to be created before BasicTex was aware of the packages I was using.

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

#93

Post by chrisfinazzo » Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 5:26 PM UTC

chrisfinazzo wrote: post #70

kelvinzhang wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We actually ran off of WeasyPrint at first but switched to Chromium due to emojis not rendering properly, poor flexbox support, no custom fonts, and other differences between the HTML you'd see in a browser vs. the generated PDF. WeasyPrint implements its own rendering engine and might support some specific @page properties that Chromium does not but given the complexity of CSS and web browsers, you're generally bett…

Flexbox support has been [included][1] since 2018, although my use case was the prototypical one - a single row w/ 3 columns - so YMMV with how it handles more complex layouts. [1]: https://github.com/Kozea/WeasyPrint/pull/579

In addition, so far I know, the @page "locations" (e.g, @top-center, etc.) are not well supported yet in all browsers which means the flexbox fallback is probably as close as we're going to get.

https://www.quackit.com/css/at-rules/css_top-center_at-rule....

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

#94

Post by tmcdos » Fri, Jan 19, 2024, 5:41 PM UTC

pitdicker wrote: post #27

Prince has been doing this for 20 years and is in my opinion the gold standard, with good support for footnotes, endnotes, page headers and other little extensions that are only relevant for printing. https://www.princexml.com/ But I'll be giving this a try!

I totally agree - PrinceXML is what I use for PDFs generation.