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PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

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Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#151

Post by tomp »

sjtgraham wrote: post #129
tomp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a PhantomJS script to download data from my bank accounts. They offer no API and disfunctional text-based exports, their websites are ridden with "good" (=terrible) web & security practices, like 3-characters-of-the-whole-password authentication, single-tab sessions, frames, etc. that makes it pretty much impossible to scrape with Python but relatively easy with a fully-fledged browser (although that still re…

Who do you bank with?

NatWest, Halifax and AMEX (not a bank, but I want my account data from there as well).

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#152

Post by asdfgadsfgasfdg »

SigmundA wrote: post #125
asdfgadsfgasfdg wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds horrible.. In general all these html->pdf ways of generating pdfs sounds horrible -- why don't people use latex for this?

Because you probably already did the layout work in HTML to display on screen to the user and now just want a PDF version of it. Or you can redo the layout in latex and maintain two layouts. The full print css is actually pretty complete, problem is the only browser that fully supports it is PrinceXML. None of the major browsers seem to care much about print layout.

But HTML layout is very different to page based layout. HTML is responsive and has no concept of pagination. PDF is paginated and has no concept of responsiveness.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#153

Post by eknkc »

egeozcan wrote: post #48
Hernanpm wrote: post #18

Besides testing, my team uses phantomjs to convert pages to PDF and also to convert javascript generated charts to images. This is sad news, I'm don't think chrome eventually will add support for.

There's wkhtmltopdf[1] when you need the PDF functionality. It is licensed with LGPL, so you can make it interop with your commercial product. [1]: https://wkhtmltopdf.org/

While it's much better than PhantomJS, still causes a lot of issues. We run a paid pet project [1] for html to pdf conversion and most of our customers have stories beginning with PhantomJS then moving to wkhtmltopdf then finally going for something else due to issues with both.

Headless Chrome might solve this issue once and for all though.

[1] https://restpack.io/html2pdf

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#155

Post by tannhaeuser »

Many thanks to the maintainer for his work. I think this isn't unexpected, and actually encourage other unpaid maintainers to follow. Reason I'm thinking this is that the current state of voluntary support is unsustainable anyway, and by letting it go we maybe could make the market for dev tools economically viable again.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#156

Post by Hernanpm »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #102
egeozcan wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's wkhtmltopdf[1] when you need the PDF functionality. It is licensed with LGPL, so you can make it interop with your commercial product. [1]: https://wkhtmltopdf.org/

Second wkhtmltopdf ... I love PhantonJS but wkhtmltopdf is a better tool for PDFs.

did you have luck with SPA to PDF? I recall I tried it but with no luck for good javascript support.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#157

Post by throwaway2016a »

Hernanpm wrote: post #156
throwaway2016a wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second wkhtmltopdf ... I love PhantonJS but wkhtmltopdf is a better tool for PDFs.

did you have luck with SPA to PDF? I recall I tried it but with no luck for good javascript support.

SPA as in Single Page Application?

We are using it for reports and we are tailoring our HTML specifically to the reports so we haven't had that issue. If I needed Javascript it may not be the best solution.

I like that it generates full PDFs (with real text objects) though not just a static image. I'm not sure if you can generate a PDF like that with PhantomJS. I haven't tried.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#158

Post by egeozcan »

eknkc wrote: post #153
egeozcan wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's wkhtmltopdf[1] when you need the PDF functionality. It is licensed with LGPL, so you can make it interop with your commercial product. [1]: https://wkhtmltopdf.org/

While it's much better than PhantomJS, still causes a lot of issues. We run a paid pet project [1] for html to pdf conversion and most of our customers have stories beginning with PhantomJS then moving to wkhtmltopdf then finally going for something else due to issues with both. Headless Chrome might solve this issue once and for all though. [1] https://restpack.io/html2pdf

For me the only issue was kerning with some specific fonts on windows servers. Do you have any other examples?

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#159

Post by edoloughlin »

avaer wrote: post #32

Open source software has to be one of the least efficient markets out there. If you sum up the very real value PhantomJS has delivered to very real companies over the last several years, napkin math tells me we wouldn't have the project being abandoned for being a "bloody hell" to work on.

Open source software has to be one of the least efficient markets out there

Does it have to be a market?

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#160

Post by cr0sh »

why-el wrote: post #149
franciscop wrote: post #145

IMO it'd be a really smart move for Google to hire Vitaly to help with the launching of this feature and things around it. He has done a great job with PhantomJS. Even an acquisition [1] of PhantomJS would totally make sense, then let him keep working on it but based on headless Chrome and with real resources. [1] Careful how you spin it for this route, learn from TJ/Express https://medium.com/@tjholowaychuk/stronglo…

This is an excellent idea.

Yeah - I like that idea too.

I played around with PhantomJS for something at my current job - it ultimately didn't work out for us (and we went a different route), but it was interesting and fun to learn about.

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