The Problem:
- LaTeX doesn't support Unicode directly, you have to switch to
XeLaTeX
- A LaTeX install to suit our needs by default on a minimal
install of debian
Packages: libtemplate-plugin-latex-perl
texlive-latex-recommended libimage-size-perl
liblatex-decode-perl
Will use 687 MB of disk space DL Size: 375 MB
- LaTeX is difficult for most people to write or modify
- LaTeX is even harder to get top class results from (because
it's hard to write)
A Solution:
- Use wkhtmltopdf which uses the WebKit rendering Engine, the
same as Chrome and Safari
- We get up to date support for CSS3 and HTML5
- The size of the install drops dramatically
Packages: wkhtmltopdf
Will use 176 MB of disk space DL Size: 52.6 MB
A massive saving of 500MB and 322MB respectively
- The package that is in debian stable is the same version as
wkhtml stable
- More people know how to code HTML
- It eliminates the need for 2 templates
we currently have one for on screen display, and one for
printing/emailing
There are many other options out there, but most have limited
support for css2 and html4, and few support css3 and html5
Does anyone have experience with this or other tools for converting
HTML to PDF?
such as mpdf, tcpdf, fpdf, dompdf. (NOTE: these would likely be a
larger install as they require PHP)
Regards
David G
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