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A comment on Wkhtmltopdf, shell utility to convert html to pdf using webkit rendering engine.

Re:Wkhtmltopdf, shell utility to convert html to pdf using w... by imurray on Monday April 16, 2012 @06:29AM (#3846779)
Every time I see a utility like this, I think maybe I could switch to producing some materials in HTML as the primary, or main intermediary, source format. Then I try the utility and realize that that would be silly.

For example, I currently make PDF slides for talks. In theory I'd like to make HTML slides, but would still like the ability to render a PDF for a robust record. However, neither this utility (or PhantomJS, which I just tried) immediately do a good job of converting something like: http://bit-player.org/deck.js/limits-to-growth-Harvard-2012-...

EDIT: also just tried cutycapt, with similar results to wkhtmltopdf (got all slides rather than just visible one, with bad page breaks, and no TeX maths).

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Re:Wkhtmltopdf, shell utility to convert html to pdf using w... by imurray on Monday April 16, 2012 @11:54AM (#3847865)
I take some of it back. Getting the latest version of wkhtmltopdf and telling it to wait (probably longer than necessary) to process javascript, works pretty well.

    wkhtmltopdf --javascript-delay 10000 --no-stop-slow-scripts 'http://bit-player.org/deck.js/limits-to-growth-Harvard-2012-03-30/ltg-talk.html#Lotka-Volterra' slide.pdf
It's a bit slow, and a bit too hacky for me. But this tool does the best job of those I've seen.

And I've just received an email pointing me to: http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?deckjs2pdf https://github.com/potyl/perl-App-deckjs2pdf that will specifically deal with Deck.JS slides.

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Re:Wkhtmltopdf, shell utility to convert html to pdf using w... by kelvin0 on Monday April 16, 2012 @08:05AM (#3846983)
Well, I am looking for some feedback on a project that converts XML to PDF. Give it a try: https://github.com/kelvin0/PyXML2PDF
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Re:Wkhtmltopdf, shell utility to convert html to pdf using w... by imurray on Monday April 16, 2012 @08:20AM (#3847024)
I am looking for a command-line utility that could do:

    webpage2pdf 'http://bit-player.org/deck.js/limits-to-growth-Harvard-2012-03-30/ltg-talk.html#Lotka-Volterra' slide.pdf
and actually work (create a sensible PDF representation of what I can see in a browser). So my feedback wouldn't be useful, as my use case is out of scope for your project: "PyXML2PDF is NOT compatible with any XHTML/HTML/CSS. It uses a small set of tags to quickly allow generation of PDFs."
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Re:Wkhtmltopdf, shell utility to convert html to pdf using w... by potyl on Monday April 16, 2012 @11:25AM (#3847754)
It seems that what you want is deckjs2pdf, get it from CPAN [1] or GitHub [2]

[1] http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?deckjs2pdf

[2] https://github.com/potyl/perl-App-deckjs2pdf

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Re:Wkhtmltopdf, shell utility to convert html to pdf using w... by pbhjpbhj on Monday April 16, 2012 @08:35AM (#3847066)
Would it be sufficient to create PNGs of the web pages and extract the text of the webpage to place in the background of a PDF file (for search, screenreading)?
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Re:Wkhtmltopdf, shell utility to convert html to pdf using w... by imurray on Monday April 16, 2012 @08:56AM (#3847130)
Not for me. Personally I'll stick to ways of making decent PDFs that don't go via HTML.
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