What's the best way to convert HTML to PDF in 2018?

#1

Post by npad » Fri, Nov 02, 2018, 9:46 AM UTC

What's the best way to convert HTML to PDF in 2018?
medium.com

Re: What's the best way to convert HTML to PDF in 2018?

#2

Post by ColinWright » Fri, Nov 02, 2018, 10:29 AM UTC

So not getting a mention are htmldoc, pandoc, LibreOffice in headless mode, and probably several others. I routinely use htmldoc and it's perfect for my needs.

YMMV.

Re: What's the best way to convert HTML to PDF in 2018?

#3

Post by npad » Fri, Nov 02, 2018, 10:35 AM UTC

ColinWright wrote: post #2

So not getting a mention are htmldoc, pandoc, LibreOffice in headless mode, and probably several others. I routinely use htmldoc and it's perfect for my needs. YMMV.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of htmldoc or that LibreOffice had a headless mode.

It does seem like htmldoc doesn't support CSS which is going to be a blocker for a lot of people.

Pandoc is definitely worth considering but I didn't include it as I believe it just delegates it's PDF rendering to a configurable engine like LaTeX, weasyprint or wkhtmltopdf.

Re: What's the best way to convert HTML to PDF in 2018?

#4

Post by FetchBen » Fri, Nov 02, 2018, 10:48 AM UTC

There are indeed a wealth of HTML to PDF solutions out there... In fact, I created yet another one.

https://fetchpdf.com

FetchPDFs focus is on the template designer, which can be linked to or embedded to allow customisation of your outputs at scale (e.g. if you need to provide all of your users with the ability to customise their PDF outputs from your service).

Re: What's the best way to convert HTML to PDF in 2018?

#5

Post by ColinWright » Fri, Nov 02, 2018, 11:04 AM UTC

npad wrote: post #3

ColinWright wrote: post #2

So not getting a mention are htmldoc, pandoc, LibreOffice in headless mode, and probably several others. I routinely use htmldoc and it's perfect for my needs. YMMV.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of htmldoc or that LibreOffice had a headless mode. It does seem like htmldoc doesn't support CSS which is going to be a blocker for a lot of people. Pandoc is definitely worth considering but I didn't include it as I believe it just delegates it's PDF rendering to a configurable engine like LaTeX, weasyprint or wkhtmltopdf.

I've used LO without an interface, but I don't know how effective it will be in general. It's very likely that the ones I mention are limited in their CSS or JS support, but my context doesn't use them (much) so I've got a much wider choice of things I can use.

In my context I'm producing documents that need to be displayed in both contexts, so I steer clear of things that are primarily HTML.