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Show HN: Webpage to PDF Microservice

imti.co

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Re: Show HN: Webpage to PDF Microservice

#31

Post by Globz »

One of my application running at work has a task of creating a user ordersheet made through the main app workflow and transposing it to an HTML document which is then converted to a PDF document by wkhtmltopdf and dispatched via email, etc.

I found this setup to be really stable and easy to maintain, so far it has produced around 70k orders per year and has been running for over 4 years now without any hiccups.

Before that I was using phantomjs but it wasn’t as fast and reliable for some reasons that I can’t quite remember now, since I havent touch that part of the app in a long time.

All I remember is that wkhtmltopdf was easier to tweak and compose with.

Re: Show HN: Webpage to PDF Microservice

#32

Post by ivanche »

thomasfromcdnjs wrote: post #3

Awesome timing. Just started work on a LinkedIn alternative called https://jaresume.com We need a reliable way of turning peoples resumes into PDF's Going to give this a go today or tomorrow. Doing it with https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer also works quite well

Such an interesting concept! I just signed up one minute ago so I can't give much more of a feedback but I wish you a great success with this!

Re: Show HN: Webpage to PDF Microservice

#33

Post by forapurpose »

rav wrote: post #14
krn wrote: post #13

A basic command line alternative using Headless Chrome[1]: chrome --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf https://www.chromestatus.com/ [1] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/headless-c...

Similar functionality is packaged in wkhtmltopdf, which essentially runs Webkit headless to print to PDF. https://wkhtmltopdf.org/

The article talks about wkhtmltopdf; in fact, they developed their server in response to its limitations:

The wkhtmltopdf utility has been around awhile and works great when you get it working correctly on your platform. However, the newest version as of this writing 0.12.5 has a bug prevening TOC generation on some platforms. Some Linux platforms require the installation of Microsoft font packs, and compiling from source leads you down a rabbit hole of dependency hell.

Re: Show HN: Webpage to PDF Microservice

#34

Post by ashkulz »

cjimti wrote: post #28
rav wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar functionality is packaged in wkhtmltopdf, which essentially runs Webkit headless to print to PDF. https://wkhtmltopdf.org/

txPDF is a simple containerized web services wrapper around wkhtmltopdf, intended to be used as a Microservice component in a larger system.

wkhtmltopdf maintainer here. That's really cool!

Did you manage to find a workaround for https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/packaging/issues/2? If so, would appreciate a PR :-)

Re: Show HN: Webpage to PDF Microservice

#35

Post by vfulco2 »

thomasfromcdnjs wrote: post #3

Awesome timing. Just started work on a LinkedIn alternative called https://jaresume.com We need a reliable way of turning peoples resumes into PDF's Going to give this a go today or tomorrow. Doing it with https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer also works quite well

I venture there is huge money in a sweet path from latex resumes in pdf format to ms word. I want to offer my clients a basic template but if I choose the latex route, I will inevitably have requests for the latter no matter how lame the format.

Re: Show HN: Webpage to PDF Microservice

#36

Post by cjimti »

ashkulz wrote: post #34
cjimti wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

txPDF is a simple containerized web services wrapper around wkhtmltopdf, intended to be used as a Microservice component in a larger system.

wkhtmltopdf maintainer here. That's really cool! Did you manage to find a workaround for https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/packaging/issues/2 ? If so, would appreciate a PR :-)

Thanks, I'll check out that issue and see if there is anything I can contribute. wkhtmltopdf is a great utility and we rely on it heavily.
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