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

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

From: Alvin Starr <..hidden..>

Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 08:28:56 -0500

I would have to agree with Chris.

I spent lots of time pulling my hair out getting latex to generate the reports I wanted but when I was done the results were crisp,clean and professional looking.

HTML is not a good report/invoice formatting tool and in general translates really poorly to paper.
managing large tables and having them break correctly over multiple pages is all but impossible with HTML.

That being said.
I have used LibreOffice to generate some complex and nice looking reports using the perl OODOC tools.
The tools worked but were a bit rough around the edges when I used them a few years ago.

LibreOffice is still not as controllable as Latex but could provide a nice way to generate spreadsheets or document files that can be (e-)mailed out.
LibreOffice is also very big and would take a lot more compute resources than Latex.

On 01/10/2016 01:24 PM, Chris Travers wrote:

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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