
Ask HN: How do you generate PDFs? - iBotPeaches
Given a complicated view mixed of HTML &amp; various JavaScript widgets that range from SVG to canvas. How do companies make beautiful PDF reports?<p>Started with wkhtmltopdf, then started investigating the SASS industry like DocRaptor and the parent PrinceXML.<p>Started messing with headless Chrome to just take screenshots of the widgets and combine those images into a PDF, but its quite hacky.<p>What do people do in situations like this?
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rexpi0
Where we can, we use LaTeX templates. In other places we use Python to
generate Word (python-docx) or PowerPoint presentations (python-pptx).

A few years ago I had success generating WYSIWYG PDFs using HTML5 and the
printable classes in CSS Bootstrap
([https://getbootstrap.com);](https://getbootstrap.com\);) in that particular
case I used CherryPy ([https://cherrypy.org](https://cherrypy.org)) under IIS
and sent the rendered HTML to pdfkit
([https://pypi.org/project/pdfkit/](https://pypi.org/project/pdfkit/)) to
generate PDFs. That was preferred over relying on the user to print to the
page to PDF from their web browser.

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jolmg
There are libraries like ruby's prawn[1].

[1] [https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn](https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn)

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jamespaden
Hi, I'm a developer at DocRaptor. What about DocRaptor didn't work for you?

