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Comment by TimTheTinker | Hacker News Reader

If you'd like to typeset HTML/CSS documents (with optional PDF-specific CSS blocks to handle page layout, numbering, header/footer, etc.), then I'd highly recommend Prince: https://www.princexml.com/

It's a typesetting-specific layout engine that supports HTML, CSS, JS, and even styled XML if that's your thing. It independently developed support for all the latest standards... it's not free but it's very good. The inventor of CSS, Håkon Wium Lie, is one of the product's developers.

I used it on an app a while back to add a PDF export feature to a web app... couldn't speak more highly of Prince.

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Wow, this is incredibly expensive. I don't mean to say it is not worth it.

I have a problem at work that requires highly dynamic content to be generated and output to pdf files. Right now, I am using excel template documents. I would love to use open technologies to do the same. Not able to find anything so far that is as flexible and user friendly. The closest alternative is to use OpenOffice Calc documents.

Prince is so good. I wrote everything I did in grad school with Prince. It’s expensive because it’s aimed at audiences that can afford to pay for good typography.

Uh, I don't know many grad students willing to blow US$495 on software like this when they can just use a combination of Overleaf / Jupyter / RMarkdown.

It's free for non-commercial use. https://www.princexml.com/download/

I just used the free version. If you include a blank first page, you can easily cut the watermark out.

Try the HTML / CSS / Paged.js workflow with headless chrome - I think it works really well (and open source / free with the exception of Chrome, where you are a bit at the mercy of Google, but they are unlikely to make any breaking changes in my opinion)

LaTeX? Not userfriendly if you aren't already used to it, but if you are nobody else will have output as beautiful as yours.

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