Re: Thoughts on using wkhtml instead of LaTeX to generate PDF and Postscript output

Hi;

On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 7:12 PM, David G <..hidden..> wrote:

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)

I am not opposed to adding support for wkhtmltopdf but I don't want to deprecate LaTeX or XeTeX. I don;t think we lose much by continuing to support LaTeX and XeTeX, but if you ever try to do typesetting of anything complex in HTML, you will find that HTML and CSS lack some very important concepts in typesetting. I could imagine if warranty forms need to be added at some point, those could become important.

Regards
David G

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Best Wishes,

Chris Travers

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