

Ask YC: Open source HTML to PDF - matticakes

Any suggestions for a solution to producing PDF's automatically from dynamic output?<p>Something preferably able to produce output similar to manually "Printing to PDF" from a browser window...
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callahad
Depending on your use case, check out [Sphinx][1], which is used for the new
[Python documentation][2]. Basically, you write your documentation in
[reStructuredText][3] which Sphinx then renders into HTML or LaTeX. The LaTeX
output can be trivially turned into a PDF and [looks great][4].

[1]: <http://sphinx.pocoo.org/>

[2]: <http://docs.python.org/>

[3]: <http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html>

[4]: <http://sphinx.pocoo.org/sphinx.pdf>

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crnixon
Flying Saucer (<https://xhtmlrenderer.dev.java.net/>) is a pretty badass
solution for what you want. It's a Java library, but you can use it in Ruby or
any other language that runs on the JVM pretty easily.

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matticakes
This is impressive, thank you. Gotta love well-formed XHTML.

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bcater
I'm not sure what your use case is, but we've had much better luck with
generating LaTeX code that we compile to PDF (the trivial step) than with
doing HTML to PDF.

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matticakes
My use case is basically taking an automated web-based daily newsletter (html,
css, images) and generating a PDF

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kbhangui
<http://www.xhtml2pdf.com/>

Perhaps this python library?

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noodle
there are a good handful of options. what language would you prefer? or do you
want some separate system?

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matticakes
It doesn't necessarily need to be built into the language that the content is
being produced in. I came across HTMLDOC, for example. I suppose anything that
can run on linux.

