From the site is very straightforward. You just right click, print,
and save as PDF. And that’s all the story there.
If you want to automate or get a PDF from a cli, then it’s a
different story.
You have puppeteer,
the first tool I’ve used for downloading pdfs, as I was somewhat
familiar with it. The thing was that I had to run a chrome instance, and
wanted a lighter and simpler solution.
One thing I loved about downloading a PDF directly from the website,
is that it let you respect the @media print query on css.
So I’d avoid the unnecessary information, like sidebars, headers, …
Instead, I’d only have the content as pdf, with the styles of the site.
Awesome!
So now that I’m using pandoc, I
want to use something like that to download the content from a
website.
$ pandoc http://localhost:8000/posts/why-using-rss-feed.html -o out.pdf
Not so fast.
It throws me an error to install a pdf engine. Fair enough.
default –pdf-engine
On pandoc you have to download a
pdf engine to be able to convert the html to pdf. It doesn’t come
pre-installed. So I downloaded MacTex (latex for mac or something
like that).
Then I run the command:
$ pandoc http://localhost:8000/posts/why-using-rss-feed.html -o out.pdf
And it works! It was fast but…
It didn’t include the styles nor respect the
@media print query to avoid unnecessary content.
Ok, let’s try something else.
prince
Searching for a way to include the styles on my downloads, I
encountered prince. Simple to
install and very straight forward on how to use it:
$ prince http://localhost:8000/posts/why-using-rss-feed.html --page-margin=10mm -o out.pdf
The output is as expected. It includes the styles and excludes the
unnecessary content according to the @media print query.
Awesome.
But there are a couple of things I don’t like.
- Not completely free to use. Buying a license costs 500 dollars for 1
user on a desktop 🙃.
- It adds an ugly logo on the pdf.
- It doesn’t recognize css grid styles.
- I had to install another program.
So I kept searching, and I remembered that with pandoc I had other pdf engine
options.
wkhtmltopdf
That’s a real name.
Looking at the wkhtmltopdf
config options for pandoc it lets you add --css to
specify the css file. Great! The thing is that I needed to make a local
reference to that file… I couldn’t reference it with http.
But I can always curl and then run the command. Ok, another
step, but nothing too crazy.
So I installed wkhtmltopdf
from their site, and worked well:
$ curl http://localhost:8000/css/styles.css > styles.css
$ pandoc http://localhost:8000/posts/why-using-rss-feed.html --pdf-engine wkhtmltopdf --css styles.css -V margin-left=10 -V margin-top=10 -V margin-right=10 -V margin-bottom=10 -o out.pdf
Something to consider is that I had to specify the margins of every
side for it to look ok, so the command got bigger.
The output was ok, it didn’t consider the css grid property but as
with prince, specifying a
margin was enough.
The last thing that was bothering me about this was that it kept
including the extra info hidden by the print media
query…
Looking at the wkhtmltopdf
config, it specifies that you can give a --print-media-type
option to make it load with the print media query.
I tried to use it from pandoc but
didn’t work, so I tried using wkhtmltopdf directly…
$ wkhtmltopdf http://localhost:8000/posts/why-using-rss-feed.html --print-media-type out.pdf
Wow. Much simpler than using wkhtmltopdf through pandoc, who would have thought?
And I have all the things I want! The same output as prince but without paying 500
dollars.
Conclusion
One thing I’ve learned with this, is to use the tools in a more
direct way, not through other tools that may limit the interface. Like
with pandoc and wkhtmltopdf.
And that’s it. Now that I’ve figured out how to download websites as
PDFs in a simple way, I’ll probably automate something for myself.
I recommend that if you’re going to use wkhtmltopdf make an alias or script
with a better name.
Have a good reading!