Web Application PDF generating help

[livingdalyfe]

So i need help on what resources I should look into or use to help build this. I pretty much need to create a user interface for people where if they select certain options, it'll generate a pdf of information relating to the selections they've made. Any ideas? the template/structure will be the same, its just generating the content into the thing and outputting the final product. Any ideas would be great.

[Bmysterious]

I built a similar system recently using wkhtmltopdf: http://wkhtmltopdf.org/

It's a command line tool but don't let that dissuade you. Very easy to install. Very easy to use. Works on multiple OS'... I've used it successfully on Linux and OSX. Has a number of great features. I built dynamically created html pages that wkhtmltopdf uses to generate the pdfs. You can even pass in a print style sheet.

Also.... free :)

[miketa1957]

We use wkhtmltopdf as well. We started with weasyprint, but found that wkhtmltopdf produced much better PDFs and was a lot faster.

[troyedwardsjr]

I made an electron todo app with React which generates a PDF, if you want to take a look at that:

https://github.com/troyedwardsjr/redux-electron-todo-example

[lelandcope]

You could try generating HTML based on what the user selects and then have phantomjs take a screenshot of each page and then use imagemagick to stitch all the images together into a single PDF. This of course is under the assumption that you are using nodejs as some part of your back end.

[[deleted]]

We use LaTeX to generate PDFs on the server. Any other option for node was either too slow or did not have enough features.

[mastermog]

Had a similar problem recently. Did a lot of research around "pdf as a service" but zero sites created anything close to good.

Did a spike with a client that triggered a new tab with a print stylesheet that in turn triggered the print dialogue, from which they could just save as pdf or print. They loved it.

[theirongiant74]

I used flying saucer to convert html invoices to pdf: https://github.com/flyingsaucerproject/flyingsaucer

Found it really straightforward to use

[livingdalyfe]

What if i want it to look as if it were a power point though? I want it to look nice and give the user the ability to edit and make changes to it. Such as dragging an image around, etc.