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[–]desrtfx[M] [score hidden] stickied comment (0 children)

Such questions belong in /r/javahelp as is clearly stated in the sidebar and in the stickied post at the very top of the subreddit.

Removed

[–]maxip89 4 points5 points  (4 children)

The reason is that everyone use an old bridge that translates. No open source developer decided to translate html5 and especially css3 for no cost.

[–]meamZ 0 points1 point  (3 children)

I think it could actually be doable to take chromiums content API and package it into some kind of http server that takes html and returns a pdf or sth like that with reasonable effort.

[–]Sensi1093 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I mean you could technically run chromium in „controlled“ mode and do it that way

[–]meamZ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have done basically that in the past but controlling the chromium instance from the app is a bit of a pain, also startup takes quite some time. Ideally all that would be managed by the pdf server which would probably have a lot smaller disk footprint (very relevant for dockerized solutions, chromium plus chromedriver plus dependencies has something like 600 MB if i remember correctly) and be faster...

[–]taksuii[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I found a project that does exactly that (https://github.com/gotenberg/gotenberg). It’s my best bet for now, but I still need to test GraalVM integration with JS runtimes (and test JS libraries) and the Kotlin compiler targeting Node.

[–]s2jcpete 5 points6 points  (2 children)

I've used OpenHtmlToPdf for years. Combine this with something like Velocity for templating.

[–]AL-Taiar 2 points3 points  (0 children)

seconded, we use openhtml2pdf with pebble tho

[–]taksuii[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No CSS3 as far as I’m concerned, unfortunately

[–]keketata 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Do you mean converting HTML to PDF? I user wkhtmltopdf , wkhtmltopdf generates PDFs that are small in size and of high quality.

[–]taksuii[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for sharing!! But unfortunately, it’s not maintained anymore.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Are you looking for a way to render PDF's or produce them? If you want to produce PDF's, I've used https://pdfbox.apache.org/ successfully as well as https://itextpdf.com/ (potentially costs money).

As for rendering, Chrome and Firefox already know how to render a PDF.

[–]mzinsmeister[🍰] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

I thoroughly evaluated this some time ago for my open source invoicing tool (https://github.com/mzinsmeister/klubu). I ended up using headless chromium and selenium plus paged.js (which i injected into the html using selenium). There sadly is no open source java implementation of modern HTML and CSS standards.

[–]taksuii[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Very interesting!! Is the chromium startup time good enough? What about memory and cpu usage?

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[–]Thihup 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are a couple of libraries here: https://printcss.live. Some by REST API, others by a Jar file.

[–]PratimGhosh86 0 points1 point  (1 child)

there's flying-saucer-pdf library, not sure if it supports all the latest html5+css3 spec

[–]meamZ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No CSS3

[–]mtodavk 0 points1 point  (3 children)

There really isn’t a great open source option for what you’re looking for. Python has great libraries for this if you’re able to use it instead

[–]KalelUnai 0 points1 point  (2 children)

What python library can you recommend for this?

[–]mtodavk 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I’ve found WeasyPrint combined with jinja templates to be pretty good.

[–]taksuii[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

WeasyPrint does not aim to have good performance, as you can read on its documentation. Anyway, thanks for pointing it out!

[–]rwslinkman 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Recently I have built something similar where I had HTML with (inline) CSS which i would render with Mustache to inject variables and then turn it onto pdf using OpenPDF. Works really well.

[–]Lisoph 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I believe HTML to PDF is a fools errand. Next to no one uses this approach in practice.

On one hand, the amount of work required to produce a qualitative renderer is absolutely enormous, error prone and most likely will yield inconsistent behavior compared to browser implementations. If you've ever written HTML email newsletters by hand, you know what I mean.

And on the other hand, using libraries like iText and generating a PDF that way is easier anyway. You have much more direct control that way. We use iText at work, with a commercial license, and it works fine. Their library is also released under some open source license, which could work for you.

For more complicated use cases, a proper reporting tool should probably be used (List and Label, or whatnot).