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Comment by timf | Hacker News Reader

I'd seen this kind of thing before but voted up after checking out the 'advanced options' section. After some googling of those "man page" style options, I see now this is probably a web wrapper around [1] so I will more likely integrate that program directly into something I'm working on. But still bookmarking the site for quick jobs.

[1] - http://github.com/antialize/wkhtmltopdf

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I've been researching ways to print the timelines on my site, Preceden. There's a complicated mix of HTML and CSS and, needless to say, it doesn't print by simply clicking Print on the browser:

http://preceden.com/timelines/2-biographies/print

This is an awesome tool because I can just add a link to the conversion URL, and wam bam: printing capabilities.

I have to tweak the CSS on the print page a bit because the site renders it a bit differently than the browser, but it works really well.

Ooh -- if that works I could do my dashboards in HTML/CSS, print them to PDF, convert the PDF to an image file, and use that. That would make my life much easier, as producing the PDFs directly is a bit of a kludge. Thanks, I'll have to look into that later.

You should have a look at Flying Saucer/xhtmlrenderer (https://xhtmlrenderer.dev.java.net/). It handles every CSS rule I could throw at it. If you simply need a commandline app converting a XHTML file into a PDF, you're done in 10 lines of code.

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