Converting HTML files to PDF

Question

I need to automatically generate a PDF file from an exisiting  X HTML-document  The input files  reports  use a rather simple  table-based layout  so support for really fancy JavaScript CSS stuff is probably not needed   As I am used to working in Java  a solution that can easily be used in a java-project is preferable  It only needs to work on windows systems  though   One way to do it that is feasable  but does not produce good quality output  at least out of the box  is using CSS2XSLFO  and Apache FOP to create the PDF files  The problem I encountered was that while CSS-attributes are converted nicely  the table-layout is pretty messed up  with text flowing out of the table cell   I also took a quick look at Jrex  a Java-API for using the Gecko rendering engine    Is there maybe a way to grab the rendered page from the internet explorer rendering engine and send it to a PDF-Printer tool automatically  I have no experience in OLE programming in windows  so I have no clue what s possible and what is not   Do you have an idea

User · Accepted Answer

The Flying Saucer XHTML renderer project has support for outputting XHTML to PDF  Have a look at an example here

User · Answer

You can use a headless firefox with an extension  It s pretty annoying to get running but it does produce good results    Check out this answer for more info

User · Answer

Check out iText  it is a pure Java PDF toolkit which has support for reading data from HTML  I used it recently in a project when I needed to pull content from our CMS and export as PDF files  and it was all rather straightforward  The support for CSS and style tags is pretty limited  but it does render tables without any problems  I never managed to set column width though   Creating a PDF from HTML goes something like this  Document doc   new Document PageSize A4   PdfWriter getInstance doc  out   doc open    HTMLWorker hw   new HTMLWorker doc   hw parse new StringReader html    doc close

User · Answer

Amyuni WebkitPDF could be used with JNI for a Windows-only solution  This is a HTML to PDF XAML conversion library  free for commercial and non-commercial use    If the output files are not needed immediately  for better scalability it may be better to have a queue and a few background processes taking items from there  converting them and storing then on the database or file system   usual disclaimer applies

User · Answer

Is there maybe a way to grab the   rendered page from the internet   explorer rendering engine and send it   to a PDF-Printer tool automatically    This is how ActivePDF works  which is good means that you know what you ll get  and it actually has reasonable styling support   It is also one of the few packages I found  when looking a few years back  that actually supports the various page-break CSS commands    Unfortunately  the ActivePDF software is very frustrating - since it has to launch the IE browser in the background for conversions it can be quite slow  and it is not particularly stable either   There is a new version currently in Beta which is supposed to be much better  but I ve not actually had a chance to try it out  so don t know how much of an improvement it is

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If you look at the side bar of your question  you will see many related questions     In your context  the simpler method might be to install a PDF print driver like PDFCreator and just print the page to this output

User · Answer

Did you try WKHTMLTOPDF   It s a simple shell utility  an open source implementation of WebKit  Both are free   We ve set a small tutorial here  EDIT  2017     If it was to build something today  I wouldn t go that route anymore  But would use http   pdfkit org  instead  Probably stripping it of all its nodejs dependencies  to run in the browser

User · Answer

If you have the funding  nothing beats Prince XML as this video shows

[java] Converting HTML files to PDF

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