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Comment by Hernanpm | Hacker News Reader

Besides testing, my team uses phantomjs to convert pages to PDF and also to convert javascript generated charts to images. This is sad news, I'm don't think chrome eventually will add support for.

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There's wkhtmltopdf[1] when you need the PDF functionality. It is licensed with LGPL, so you can make it interop with your commercial product.

[1]: https://wkhtmltopdf.org/

Second wkhtmltopdf ... I love PhantonJS but wkhtmltopdf is a better tool for PDFs.

did you have luck with SPA to PDF? I recall I tried it but with no luck for good javascript support.

SPA as in Single Page Application?

We are using it for reports and we are tailoring our HTML specifically to the reports so we haven't had that issue. If I needed Javascript it may not be the best solution.

I like that it generates full PDFs (with real text objects) though not just a static image. I'm not sure if you can generate a PDF like that with PhantomJS. I haven't tried.

I have been using it for almost 2 years on a production server to generate html orders to PDF on the fly, such an amazing tool.

And there's its sister project wkhtmltoimage for rendering to images as well :) Sadly, though, the browser seems way behind the times so I think Chrome will win the next round. I built a prototype library for rendering pages to animated GIFs using the Chrome debugging protocol, but headless will make it even easier: https://github.com/peterc/chrome2gif

While it's much better than PhantomJS, still causes a lot of issues. We run a paid pet project [1] for html to pdf conversion and most of our customers have stories beginning with PhantomJS then moving to wkhtmltopdf then finally going for something else due to issues with both.

Headless Chrome might solve this issue once and for all though.

[1] https://restpack.io/html2pdf

For me the only issue was kerning with some specific fonts on windows servers. Do you have any other examples?

We recently ended up using NightmareJS with xvfb in Debian Docker image to produce high fidelity PDF's.

Seems to work well so far.

Chrome will have headless save to PDF fairly soon: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=603559

You can use WebDriver to take screenshots. OTOH I don't think there's any way to do PDF generation without fucking around with injecting window.print() and trying to go from there.

Hey - what do you use for the pdf conversion specifically? We've been looking for something like this. Thanks in advance.

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