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Show HN: Pdf-Bot, an API/CLI for Generating PDFs Using Headless Chrome

235 points by esbenp 9y ago

vbezhenar 9y ago
Headless chrome is awesome. I'm using it to generate multiple PNG from SVG.
- keyle 9y ago
  I agree with you but as a 'old' developer, I find it pretty sad that you have to fire up a headless browser + its gigaton of code, to convert a SVG to PNG. But I agree with you, headless chrome can be very useful.
  - bshimmin 9y ago
    I take your point in general, but I'm not sure this specific task - converting of SVGs - has ever been one that has easily been solved by some tiny amount of code: probably the way I would have done this in the past (say, ten years ago) would have been using Apache Batik's rasteriser, which is far from a lightweight solution itself.
    - matthewmacleod 9y ago
      It's not tiny, but in case anybody else is trying to do the same thing, I'd reach for librsvg (https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/LibRsvg https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/LibRsvg).
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - wibr 9y ago
    You could also do that with inkscape on the commandline, not sure if it's faster, though...
  - _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
    We currently use Apache Batik (JVM/Scala) to generate PNG for server generated SVGs of charts. SVG is wonderful for generating charts, easy even without any framework.
- alfonsodev 9y ago
  Indeed, I see lately many cool projects emerging. Is a pity that not all projects are using the same GitHub tag #headless-chromium [1] This other project[2] was recently on HN but you can't find it easily on github search. [1] https://github.com/search?q=topic%3Aheadless-chromium&type=Repositories https://github.com/search?q=topic%3Aheadless-chromium&type=R... [2] https://github.com/DevExpress/testcafe https://github.com/DevExpress/testcafe
czechdeveloper 9y ago
All I need now is CMYK support in Chrome and I can make HTML based print ready PDF rendering. That would be quite upgrade compared to my current options.
- hwc 9y ago
  I work on Chrome's PDF generation. Please file a bug report if you think this is an important feature.
  - synthmeat 9y ago
    I'll upvote both this and track bug report, if linked. Yes, CMYK support is very tempting feature for the whole print industry.
umpox 9y ago
Pretty cool! Check out Google's headless browser API Puppeteer too, they provide a few really useful functions for doing stuff like this. https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/blob/master/examples/pdf.js https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/blob/master/exampl... Really easy to work around, I used it to build a simple CLI to generate device screenshots of a webpage by modifying the user-agent and resolution to match each device. https://github.com/umpox/generateDeviceScreenshots https://github.com/umpox/generateDeviceScreenshots
- esbenp 9y ago
  Yeah I think Puppeteer is a very cool project. Unfortunately, it came out literally one or two days after i finished the initial version of pdf-bot. Maybe I will incorporate it soon! :-)
- rememberlenny 9y ago
  Cool project
matallo 9y ago
idea: using this as "send to kindle" generating pdfs from urls you stumble upon, and seamlessly sending them to the *@kindle.com email address to consume in the device I don't know if there's an easier way or service these days
- rcarmo 9y ago
  Instapaper did that pretty well, and I think Pocket Premium does that too - in MOBI format, which is much easier to read on the Kindle than PDF. These days I use Calibre instead because the overall experience is better, but for single articles it's a bit overkill.
- unmole 9y ago
  I use the Push to Kindle app from FiveFilters.org to do this.
- esbenp 9y ago
  That is a cool idea! Would only require to setup a small server as webhook endpoint that creates the e-mail.
- pcnix 9y ago
  I use a script that implements calibre's ebook-convert command line to convert and mail mobi files to myself from html urls. The ebook-convert command is powerful enough that I can join several html pages together, and also add chapter hooks and titles. I used to use this to download and read Wheel of Time rereads on Tor for a while.
bharani_m 9y ago
Really nice work. I've had a great experience working with Headless Chrome to convert webpages to PDF for my side project EmailThis (https://www.emailthis.me https://www.emailthis.me). It uses Puppeteer by Chrome DevTools team - https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer.
- esbenp 9y ago
  Appreciate it. EmailThis lookes very cool! I have considered using Puppeteer for pdf-bot, it came out right after I finished it :-)
- RepressedEmu 9y ago
  Just a heads up -- your site emailthis.me is down.
  - bharani_m 9y ago
    Sorry about the brief downtime. It's back up now.
- johnwaynedoe 9y ago
  Cool project! I think I am going to start regularly making use of it. Does it email you a PDF attachment, or does it just send an email with the contents of the article within it? When I attempted to use it I did not see a pdf attachment. Regardless/either way, really cool project.
  - bharani_m 9y ago
    Thanks, if it is unable to extract useful content from a page, EmailThis will save it as PDF as send it as an attachmentment. If you try saving a any discussion website (HN, Stackoverflow, Reddit), you will get the PDF.
bm98 9y ago
Interesting to compare this to some of the "old school" solutions for converting web pages to PDF such as htmldoc[0] or html2ps[1]. [0] https://github.com/michaelrsweet/htmldoc https://github.com/michaelrsweet/htmldoc [1] http://user.it.uu.se/~jan/html2ps.html http://user.it.uu.se/~jan/html2ps.html
- Wilya 9y ago
  The old school solutions lack any sort of javascript support (per the docs, htmldoc doesn't even support css), so they wouldn't work for a lot of real world websites. That's not really the same use case. A better comparison would be against the likes of wkhtmltopdf[0], which uses webkit, or the pdf generation features of phantomjs. [0] https://wkhtmltopdf.org/ https://wkhtmltopdf.org/
  - j_s 9y ago
    https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf/issues https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf/issues 1,047 Open 975 Closed Yep, that's about how I remember it. It was such a pain to build on Windows (especially to get a single static binary) that people contributing fixes would often attain hero status by attaching a random binary to an issue. Specifically, GIF support was broken on the official Windows build for 4+ years: https://web.archive.org/web/20140917181225/http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/issues/detail?id=441#c41 https://web.archive.org/web/20140917181225/http://code.googl...
shubhamjain 9y ago
I am guessing this works by splitting screenshots of a web page and gluing them as pages in the PDF file. Doesn't that mean the size of the PDF would grow to be large once it passes few pages? How does it handle content (like, tables) that don't have line breaks?
- gima 9y ago
  It uses Chrome's built-in print-to-PDF functionality via Chrome Debug/DevTools Protocol. In other words it creates PDF files with real vector graphics and text, not just images embedded in PDF. Page.printToPDF: https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/tot/Page/#method-printToPDF https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/tot/Page/...
  - shubhamjain 9y ago
    I didn't know that existed. How good is it with corner cases? HTML->PDF is a notoriously difficult problem; even generating PDF is. There are several software services which charge well for doing that (Docraptor, PrinceXML). If it's smooth and handles everything well, is there any reason someone should pay for them?
    - gima 9y ago
      It's available from the normal Chrome print menu, so you can test it yourself easily. But to answer: I haven't used it extensively, but CSS and Javascript tend to make it a bit tricky. When you are viewing a webpage in the browser, you have one viewport, and scrolling can change the appearance or position of elements. Translating this to one long PDF is troublesome on some websites. As to what companies do that provide this as a service? I've got no clue, maybe brand this as their unique service? :D
    - j_s 9y ago
      PDF generation (especially from a JavaScript-enhanced HTML page) has enough corner cases that it is typically best implemented with commercial support paying someone to polish away the rough edges. There are many "free as in beer" (closed-source), freemium, and/or free trial options offered as a carrot leading to a commercial product. Most have a watermark and/or page count limitations. http://selectpdf.com/community-edition/ http://selectpdf.com/community-edition/ (5 pages max)
criddell 9y ago
Can it generate a table of contents with page numbers?
- aumerle 9y ago
  calibre has been able to convert arbitrary HTML files to PDF with Table of Contents with page numbers, links, embedded fonts, arbitrary headers/footers for years, all rendered using WebKit, without a running X server, for years. ebook-convert file.html file.pdf --pdf-add-toc
- hwc 9y ago
  It can do what HTML can do. You can have a TOC with internal links. Those links should continue to work inside the PDF.
sdeframond 9y ago
Nice work ! Depending on your use case, I feel like you guys might be interested in http://weasyprint.org/ http://weasyprint.org/. It is an open source HTML to PDF converter written in Python. It passes the Acid2 test and implements CSS Paged Media.
- vegbrasil 9y ago
  WeasyPrint seems awesome. Going to prototype with it later! Thanks
- j_s 9y ago
  Always nice to discover another open source HTML rendering engine! I recently discovered https://github.com/ArthurHub/HTML-Renderer https://github.com/ArthurHub/HTML-Renderer formerly know as https://htmlrenderer.codeplex.com/ https://htmlrenderer.codeplex.com/ PDF generation [...] 100% managed (C#), High performance HTML Rendering library
igitur 9y ago
How does this compare to wkhtmltopdf, which, IIRC, uses WebKit to render the pdf?
- shimon_e 9y ago
  Buggy as hell. Doesn't render things as expected. I'm using headless chrome for pdf generation internally and couldn't be happier. I directly call chrome from the command line it couldn't be simpler. I don't know why people need all these wrappers.
- esbenp 9y ago
  We actually used wkhtmltopdf before we started using pdf-bot. wkhtmltopdf development has slowed a lot, it is very unstable and you need to run a 2 year old alpha version to support flexbox (if I remember correctly) :-) headless chrome is a lot more stable choice imo.
  - bshimmin 9y ago
    We had an absolutely ghastly time last year trying to implement wkhtmltopdf in a Rails app - we probably wasted an entire week fighting with both Wicked PDF and PDFKit before we just gave up and wrote something using Prawn instead (which was, of course, extremely time-consuming in a different way, but at least the end result was good).
    - boundlessdreamz 9y ago
      What problems did you run into with wkhtmltopdf? We have been using it without much trouble. Chrome pdf generation is nice but wkhtmltopdf generates smaller PDFs with table of contents.
      - bshimmin 9y ago
        All kinds of problems that others have mentioned above, plus in terms of the Rails integration, it felt like we hit almost every one of the open issues on the GitHub repos for both Wicked PDF and PDFKit. I vaguely recall fonts in production being a problem, a general lack of reliability, performance issues, fiddling around with various different binaries of wkhtmltopdf to find one that maybe worked... probably other things besides. It was a bad week and I wish I hadn't reminded myself! (With no disrespect, of course, to the authors of these libraries - they just didn't work well for us.)
flashman 9y ago
How well does it work with multiple-page PDFs? One of our banes is generating mixed text/image downloadable reports with sensible page breaks. To save time, we're actually doing those as docx files, with the bonus/risk that clients can edit the content before saving it as a PDF.
- DonnyV 9y ago
  Just use WkhtmlToPdf https://wkhtmltopdf.org https://wkhtmltopdf.org and wrap a simple service around it.
  - bshimmin 9y ago
    That's one hell of a "just".
    - DonnyV 9y ago
      I did it in 2 days. Its not very hard.
  - moocowtruck 9y ago
    DonnyV don't you know we need 15 million of the same things in technology :)
    - joshribakoff 9y ago
      Wkhtmltopdf has basically not been updated in years aside from minor bug fixes. It has major issues the author has no plans to fix. I've spend 100s of hours applying workarounds to legacy codebases. All that code could be refactored now. Phantomjs and wkhtmltopdf don't even support doing $(.htmlE).width() from JavaScript. This can complicate laying out the page needless to say. https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf/issues/2419 https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf/issues/2419
      - DonnyV 9y ago
        Why are you doing layout code in javascript? If it can't be done using CSS then your doing something wrong. This is being used to generate PDFs of exact width and height size documents. Hard code the width and height of your page.
brajesh 9y ago
Are there any similar wrappers around headless Firefox, which has been released recently (Firefox 55)? Mozilla's documentation (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Headless_mode https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Headless_mode) is still incomplete.
- dagurp 9y ago
  I assume they're waiting for Servo
rmetzler 9y ago
Thank you very much. I'm excited to try it out. Great documentation, I wish more people would explain their project's software architecture in the README.
titel 9y ago
Whould this work on AWS Lambda?
- joshribakoff 9y ago
  Since it's designed to run daemonized as a queue I'd think you'd have an issue with execution time limit
- benmanns 9y ago
  Check out https://github.com/adieuadieu/serverless-chrome#printtopdf-print-a-given-url-to-pdf https://github.com/adieuadieu/serverless-chrome#printtopdf-p...
joshribakoff 9y ago
What's up with the built in queue? I feel like that belongs in a different script. For one, the built in nodeJS queue is useless in a multiple server environment. You'd still need a distributed queue since this built in one is only local to one server/thread. So the built in queue becomes redundant/pointless for any kind of solution that needs to scale
- chatmasta 9y ago
  Not the OP, but maybe he wanted to keep the install as simple as possible without requiring something like redis. I also haven't looked at the code, but a queue per process is still useful as long as the results can be accessed from any process. Not sure if this is the case. If not, you would seem to be right, in that subsequent requests after "queuing" the job could go to another process/server not aware of the queued job.
- xg15 9y ago
  I was first wondering about all the complexity in the API as well (why a built-in queue, webhook, retry policy and storage interface when the actual transaction I'm interested in is just "url -> pdf blob"?) However, I think this is necessary if you want to fit it into a microservice with a REST interface. For REST, I think the usual expectation is that a) the request returns quickly and b) you can submit any number of requests in parallel. Given that loading a page into headless chrome, rendering it and generating a pdf is both resource intensive and time consuming, I guess you need some way to decouple that process from the interface.
gbuk2013 9y ago
This is interesting :-) I am currently using athenapdf[1] but I will have a play with pdf-bot. [1] https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf
- MrSaints 9y ago
  Core developer of `athenapdf` here :) I had a quick look at `pdf-bot`, and though we both rely on the same underlying technology (we are only just moving to headless Chromium; we were on Electron before), I believe we have slightly different ambitions with our respective project. But, I may be biased. For example, `pdf-bot` seems to be tied exclusively to a specific converter, and storage backend. With `athenapdf` however, we are moving more, and more towards building a toolkit or rather, framework for other people to construct their own conversion processes (or even microservice)[0]. Consequently, we are working towards general abstractions like fetching, converting, and uploading, that can have different implementations (e.g. wkhtmltopdf, LibreOffice, Weasyprint, etc). With our microservice assembly as well, we are focused heavily on ensuring we have: 1. Instrumentation, and metrics (which `pdf-bot` appears to currently lack) 2. Support for different retry mechanisms (e.g. retry using the same converter or retry using a different converter) 3. Support for multiple input MIME types 4. Synchronous API calls (`pdf-bot` appears to be mostly asynchronous, with batch processing, and callbacks) 5. Ease of installation (e.g. Docker), and configuration We also have a CLI assembly[1] that can support custom JavaScript plugins[2] (e.g. Markdown -> PDF, Readability, etc). So you don't need to run a service or make API calls for conversions. [0] https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf/tree/v3/pkg https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf/tree/v3/pkg [1] https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf/blob/v3/cmd/cli/main.go#L27 https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf/blob/v3/cmd/cli/main.g... [2] https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf/tree/v3/pkg/runner/plugin/js https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf/tree/v3/pkg/runner/plu...
  - gbuk2013 9y ago
    Thank you for athenapdf and for rescuing me from the pains of wkhtmltopdf - I am a happy user. :) My only small problem with it was the somewhat complex setup for using athenapdf-service with a new project (especially since I use docker-machine) but I have now mostly automated the whole thing. Just out of interest - do you consider asynchronous an advantage (being a Node developer I generally love async very much)? Not that it matters to me - my needs are trivial for the service to handle. Edit: actually I can see how it async would make my life much more complicated for my simple use case - I would have to write something to track requests and responses rather than just looping through a bunch of URL's that need converting.
oxplot 9y ago
Unfortunately, Chrome's kerning when it comes to printing is atrocious. Over the years, I've constantly tested it every once in a while with the hope that it would improve to no avail. Currently, the only print ready HTML to PDF processor that I know is Prince [1] and to a lesser extent Firefox. [1]: https://www.princexml.com/ https://www.princexml.com/
- sk5t 9y ago
  Prince is awesome. Its support for paged media has impressed me again and again.
- kyriakos 9y ago
  does Firefox support css paged media?

235 points by esbenp 9y ago

vbezhenar 9y ago

Headless chrome is awesome. I'm using it to generate multiple PNG from SVG.

keyle 9y ago
I agree with you but as a 'old' developer, I find it pretty sad that you have to fire up a headless browser + its gigaton of code, to convert a SVG to PNG. But I agree with you, headless chrome can be very useful.
- bshimmin 9y ago
  I take your point in general, but I'm not sure this specific task - converting of SVGs - has ever been one that has easily been solved by some tiny amount of code: probably the way I would have done this in the past (say, ten years ago) would have been using Apache Batik's rasteriser, which is far from a lightweight solution itself.
  - matthewmacleod 9y ago
    It's not tiny, but in case anybody else is trying to do the same thing, I'd reach for librsvg (https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/LibRsvg https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/LibRsvg).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- wibr 9y ago
  You could also do that with inkscape on the commandline, not sure if it's faster, though...
- _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
  We currently use Apache Batik (JVM/Scala) to generate PNG for server generated SVGs of charts. SVG is wonderful for generating charts, easy even without any framework.
alfonsodev 9y ago
Indeed, I see lately many cool projects emerging. Is a pity that not all projects are using the same GitHub tag #headless-chromium [1] This other project[2] was recently on HN but you can't find it easily on github search. [1] https://github.com/search?q=topic%3Aheadless-chromium&type=Repositories https://github.com/search?q=topic%3Aheadless-chromium&type=R... [2] https://github.com/DevExpress/testcafe https://github.com/DevExpress/testcafe

czechdeveloper 9y ago

All I need now is CMYK support in Chrome and I can make HTML based print ready PDF rendering. That would be quite upgrade compared to my current options.

hwc 9y ago
I work on Chrome's PDF generation. Please file a bug report if you think this is an important feature.
- synthmeat 9y ago
  I'll upvote both this and track bug report, if linked. Yes, CMYK support is very tempting feature for the whole print industry.

umpox 9y ago

Pretty cool! Check out Google's headless browser API Puppeteer too, they provide a few really useful functions for doing stuff like this. https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/blob/master/examples/pdf.js https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/blob/master/exampl... Really easy to work around, I used it to build a simple CLI to generate device screenshots of a webpage by modifying the user-agent and resolution to match each device. https://github.com/umpox/generateDeviceScreenshots https://github.com/umpox/generateDeviceScreenshots

esbenp 9y ago
Yeah I think Puppeteer is a very cool project. Unfortunately, it came out literally one or two days after i finished the initial version of pdf-bot. Maybe I will incorporate it soon! :-)
rememberlenny 9y ago
Cool project

matallo 9y ago

idea: using this as "send to kindle" generating pdfs from urls you stumble upon, and seamlessly sending them to the *@kindle.com email address to consume in the device I don't know if there's an easier way or service these days

rcarmo 9y ago
Instapaper did that pretty well, and I think Pocket Premium does that too - in MOBI format, which is much easier to read on the Kindle than PDF. These days I use Calibre instead because the overall experience is better, but for single articles it's a bit overkill.
unmole 9y ago
I use the Push to Kindle app from FiveFilters.org to do this.
esbenp 9y ago
That is a cool idea! Would only require to setup a small server as webhook endpoint that creates the e-mail.
pcnix 9y ago
I use a script that implements calibre's ebook-convert command line to convert and mail mobi files to myself from html urls. The ebook-convert command is powerful enough that I can join several html pages together, and also add chapter hooks and titles. I used to use this to download and read Wheel of Time rereads on Tor for a while.

bharani_m 9y ago

Really nice work. I've had a great experience working with Headless Chrome to convert webpages to PDF for my side project EmailThis (https://www.emailthis.me https://www.emailthis.me). It uses Puppeteer by Chrome DevTools team - https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer.

esbenp 9y ago
Appreciate it. EmailThis lookes very cool! I have considered using Puppeteer for pdf-bot, it came out right after I finished it :-)
RepressedEmu 9y ago
Just a heads up -- your site emailthis.me is down.
- bharani_m 9y ago
  Sorry about the brief downtime. It's back up now.
johnwaynedoe 9y ago
Cool project! I think I am going to start regularly making use of it. Does it email you a PDF attachment, or does it just send an email with the contents of the article within it? When I attempted to use it I did not see a pdf attachment. Regardless/either way, really cool project.
- bharani_m 9y ago
  Thanks, if it is unable to extract useful content from a page, EmailThis will save it as PDF as send it as an attachmentment. If you try saving a any discussion website (HN, Stackoverflow, Reddit), you will get the PDF.

bm98 9y ago

Interesting to compare this to some of the "old school" solutions for converting web pages to PDF such as htmldoc[0] or html2ps[1]. [0] https://github.com/michaelrsweet/htmldoc https://github.com/michaelrsweet/htmldoc [1] http://user.it.uu.se/~jan/html2ps.html http://user.it.uu.se/~jan/html2ps.html

Wilya 9y ago
The old school solutions lack any sort of javascript support (per the docs, htmldoc doesn't even support css), so they wouldn't work for a lot of real world websites. That's not really the same use case. A better comparison would be against the likes of wkhtmltopdf[0], which uses webkit, or the pdf generation features of phantomjs. [0] https://wkhtmltopdf.org/ https://wkhtmltopdf.org/
- j_s 9y ago
  https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf/issues https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf/issues 1,047 Open 975 Closed Yep, that's about how I remember it. It was such a pain to build on Windows (especially to get a single static binary) that people contributing fixes would often attain hero status by attaching a random binary to an issue. Specifically, GIF support was broken on the official Windows build for 4+ years: https://web.archive.org/web/20140917181225/http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/issues/detail?id=441#c41 https://web.archive.org/web/20140917181225/http://code.googl...

shubhamjain 9y ago

I am guessing this works by splitting screenshots of a web page and gluing them as pages in the PDF file. Doesn't that mean the size of the PDF would grow to be large once it passes few pages? How does it handle content (like, tables) that don't have line breaks?

gima 9y ago
It uses Chrome's built-in print-to-PDF functionality via Chrome Debug/DevTools Protocol. In other words it creates PDF files with real vector graphics and text, not just images embedded in PDF. Page.printToPDF: https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/tot/Page/#method-printToPDF https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/tot/Page/...
- shubhamjain 9y ago
  I didn't know that existed. How good is it with corner cases? HTML->PDF is a notoriously difficult problem; even generating PDF is. There are several software services which charge well for doing that (Docraptor, PrinceXML). If it's smooth and handles everything well, is there any reason someone should pay for them?
  - gima 9y ago
    It's available from the normal Chrome print menu, so you can test it yourself easily. But to answer: I haven't used it extensively, but CSS and Javascript tend to make it a bit tricky. When you are viewing a webpage in the browser, you have one viewport, and scrolling can change the appearance or position of elements. Translating this to one long PDF is troublesome on some websites. As to what companies do that provide this as a service? I've got no clue, maybe brand this as their unique service? :D
  - j_s 9y ago
    PDF generation (especially from a JavaScript-enhanced HTML page) has enough corner cases that it is typically best implemented with commercial support paying someone to polish away the rough edges. There are many "free as in beer" (closed-source), freemium, and/or free trial options offered as a carrot leading to a commercial product. Most have a watermark and/or page count limitations. http://selectpdf.com/community-edition/ http://selectpdf.com/community-edition/ (5 pages max)

criddell 9y ago

Can it generate a table of contents with page numbers?

aumerle 9y ago
calibre has been able to convert arbitrary HTML files to PDF with Table of Contents with page numbers, links, embedded fonts, arbitrary headers/footers for years, all rendered using WebKit, without a running X server, for years. ebook-convert file.html file.pdf --pdf-add-toc
hwc 9y ago
It can do what HTML can do. You can have a TOC with internal links. Those links should continue to work inside the PDF.

sdeframond 9y ago

Nice work ! Depending on your use case, I feel like you guys might be interested in http://weasyprint.org/ http://weasyprint.org/. It is an open source HTML to PDF converter written in Python. It passes the Acid2 test and implements CSS Paged Media.

vegbrasil 9y ago
WeasyPrint seems awesome. Going to prototype with it later! Thanks
j_s 9y ago
Always nice to discover another open source HTML rendering engine! I recently discovered https://github.com/ArthurHub/HTML-Renderer https://github.com/ArthurHub/HTML-Renderer formerly know as https://htmlrenderer.codeplex.com/ https://htmlrenderer.codeplex.com/ PDF generation [...] 100% managed (C#), High performance HTML Rendering library

igitur 9y ago

How does this compare to wkhtmltopdf, which, IIRC, uses WebKit to render the pdf?

shimon_e 9y ago
Buggy as hell. Doesn't render things as expected. I'm using headless chrome for pdf generation internally and couldn't be happier. I directly call chrome from the command line it couldn't be simpler. I don't know why people need all these wrappers.
esbenp 9y ago
We actually used wkhtmltopdf before we started using pdf-bot. wkhtmltopdf development has slowed a lot, it is very unstable and you need to run a 2 year old alpha version to support flexbox (if I remember correctly) :-) headless chrome is a lot more stable choice imo.
- bshimmin 9y ago
  We had an absolutely ghastly time last year trying to implement wkhtmltopdf in a Rails app - we probably wasted an entire week fighting with both Wicked PDF and PDFKit before we just gave up and wrote something using Prawn instead (which was, of course, extremely time-consuming in a different way, but at least the end result was good).
  - boundlessdreamz 9y ago
    What problems did you run into with wkhtmltopdf? We have been using it without much trouble. Chrome pdf generation is nice but wkhtmltopdf generates smaller PDFs with table of contents.
    - bshimmin 9y ago
      All kinds of problems that others have mentioned above, plus in terms of the Rails integration, it felt like we hit almost every one of the open issues on the GitHub repos for both Wicked PDF and PDFKit. I vaguely recall fonts in production being a problem, a general lack of reliability, performance issues, fiddling around with various different binaries of wkhtmltopdf to find one that maybe worked... probably other things besides. It was a bad week and I wish I hadn't reminded myself! (With no disrespect, of course, to the authors of these libraries - they just didn't work well for us.)

flashman 9y ago

How well does it work with multiple-page PDFs? One of our banes is generating mixed text/image downloadable reports with sensible page breaks. To save time, we're actually doing those as docx files, with the bonus/risk that clients can edit the content before saving it as a PDF.

DonnyV 9y ago
Just use WkhtmlToPdf https://wkhtmltopdf.org https://wkhtmltopdf.org and wrap a simple service around it.
- bshimmin 9y ago
  That's one hell of a "just".
  - DonnyV 9y ago
    I did it in 2 days. Its not very hard.
- moocowtruck 9y ago
  DonnyV don't you know we need 15 million of the same things in technology :)
  - joshribakoff 9y ago
    Wkhtmltopdf has basically not been updated in years aside from minor bug fixes. It has major issues the author has no plans to fix. I've spend 100s of hours applying workarounds to legacy codebases. All that code could be refactored now. Phantomjs and wkhtmltopdf don't even support doing $(.htmlE).width() from JavaScript. This can complicate laying out the page needless to say. https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf/issues/2419 https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf/issues/2419
    - DonnyV 9y ago
      Why are you doing layout code in javascript? If it can't be done using CSS then your doing something wrong. This is being used to generate PDFs of exact width and height size documents. Hard code the width and height of your page.

brajesh 9y ago

Are there any similar wrappers around headless Firefox, which has been released recently (Firefox 55)? Mozilla's documentation (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Headless_mode https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Headless_mode) is still incomplete.

dagurp 9y ago
I assume they're waiting for Servo

rmetzler 9y ago

Thank you very much. I'm excited to try it out. Great documentation, I wish more people would explain their project's software architecture in the README.

titel 9y ago

Whould this work on AWS Lambda?

joshribakoff 9y ago
Since it's designed to run daemonized as a queue I'd think you'd have an issue with execution time limit
benmanns 9y ago
Check out https://github.com/adieuadieu/serverless-chrome#printtopdf-print-a-given-url-to-pdf https://github.com/adieuadieu/serverless-chrome#printtopdf-p...

joshribakoff 9y ago

What's up with the built in queue? I feel like that belongs in a different script. For one, the built in nodeJS queue is useless in a multiple server environment. You'd still need a distributed queue since this built in one is only local to one server/thread. So the built in queue becomes redundant/pointless for any kind of solution that needs to scale

chatmasta 9y ago
Not the OP, but maybe he wanted to keep the install as simple as possible without requiring something like redis. I also haven't looked at the code, but a queue per process is still useful as long as the results can be accessed from any process. Not sure if this is the case. If not, you would seem to be right, in that subsequent requests after "queuing" the job could go to another process/server not aware of the queued job.
xg15 9y ago
I was first wondering about all the complexity in the API as well (why a built-in queue, webhook, retry policy and storage interface when the actual transaction I'm interested in is just "url -> pdf blob"?) However, I think this is necessary if you want to fit it into a microservice with a REST interface. For REST, I think the usual expectation is that a) the request returns quickly and b) you can submit any number of requests in parallel. Given that loading a page into headless chrome, rendering it and generating a pdf is both resource intensive and time consuming, I guess you need some way to decouple that process from the interface.

gbuk2013 9y ago

This is interesting :-) I am currently using athenapdf[1] but I will have a play with pdf-bot. [1] https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf

MrSaints 9y ago
Core developer of `athenapdf` here :) I had a quick look at `pdf-bot`, and though we both rely on the same underlying technology (we are only just moving to headless Chromium; we were on Electron before), I believe we have slightly different ambitions with our respective project. But, I may be biased. For example, `pdf-bot` seems to be tied exclusively to a specific converter, and storage backend. With `athenapdf` however, we are moving more, and more towards building a toolkit or rather, framework for other people to construct their own conversion processes (or even microservice)[0]. Consequently, we are working towards general abstractions like fetching, converting, and uploading, that can have different implementations (e.g. wkhtmltopdf, LibreOffice, Weasyprint, etc). With our microservice assembly as well, we are focused heavily on ensuring we have: 1. Instrumentation, and metrics (which `pdf-bot` appears to currently lack) 2. Support for different retry mechanisms (e.g. retry using the same converter or retry using a different converter) 3. Support for multiple input MIME types 4. Synchronous API calls (`pdf-bot` appears to be mostly asynchronous, with batch processing, and callbacks) 5. Ease of installation (e.g. Docker), and configuration We also have a CLI assembly[1] that can support custom JavaScript plugins[2] (e.g. Markdown -> PDF, Readability, etc). So you don't need to run a service or make API calls for conversions. [0] https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf/tree/v3/pkg https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf/tree/v3/pkg [1] https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf/blob/v3/cmd/cli/main.go#L27 https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf/blob/v3/cmd/cli/main.g... [2] https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf/tree/v3/pkg/runner/plugin/js https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf/tree/v3/pkg/runner/plu...
- gbuk2013 9y ago
  Thank you for athenapdf and for rescuing me from the pains of wkhtmltopdf - I am a happy user. :) My only small problem with it was the somewhat complex setup for using athenapdf-service with a new project (especially since I use docker-machine) but I have now mostly automated the whole thing. Just out of interest - do you consider asynchronous an advantage (being a Node developer I generally love async very much)? Not that it matters to me - my needs are trivial for the service to handle. Edit: actually I can see how it async would make my life much more complicated for my simple use case - I would have to write something to track requests and responses rather than just looping through a bunch of URL's that need converting.

oxplot 9y ago

Unfortunately, Chrome's kerning when it comes to printing is atrocious. Over the years, I've constantly tested it every once in a while with the hope that it would improve to no avail. Currently, the only print ready HTML to PDF processor that I know is Prince [1] and to a lesser extent Firefox. [1]: https://www.princexml.com/ https://www.princexml.com/

sk5t 9y ago
Prince is awesome. Its support for paged media has impressed me again and again.
kyriakos 9y ago
does Firefox support css paged media?