Show HN: htmldocs - Typeset and Generate PDFs with HTML/CSS

Re:Show HN: htmldocs - Typeset and Generate PDFs with HTML/CSS by kelvinzhang on Wednesday January 17, 2024 @10:03AM (#39028644)

We actually ran off of WeasyPrint at first but switched to Chromium due to emojis not rendering properly, poor flexbox support, no custom fonts, and other differences between the HTML you'd see in a browser vs. the generated PDF.

WeasyPrint implements its own rendering engine and might support some specific @page properties that Chromium does not but given the complexity of CSS and web browsers, you're generally better off sticking with Chromium due to its history.

Also – an added benefit is that we can use JS libraries like FontAwesome, Bootstrap, KaTeX, etc. which is where other HTML to PDF libraries fall flat.

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Re:Show HN: htmldocs - Typeset and Generate PDFs with HTML/CSS by chrisfinazzo on Wednesday January 17, 2024 @05:49PM (#39034704)

Flexbox support has been [included][1] since 2018, although my use case was the prototypical one - a single row w/ 3 columns - so YMMV with how it handles more complex layouts.

[1]: https://github.com/Kozea/WeasyPrint/pull/579

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Re:Show HN: htmldocs - Typeset and Generate PDFs with HTML/CSS by chrisfinazzo on Thursday January 18, 2024 @12:26PM (#39044596)

In addition, so far I know, the @page "locations" (e.g, @top-center, etc.) are not well supported yet in all browsers which means the flexbox fallback is probably as close as we're going to get.

https://www.quackit.com/css/at-rules/css_top-center_at-rule....

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