Converting html files to pdf from the commandline
05 Sep 2013When you need to convert an html file to a pdf, often the default pdf printer of your OS is enough. For those times when you need a much better rendering, you need a better tool.
I had to convert my html/css resume to a pdf file today. The default pdf printer on Ubuntu was discarding the background color and adding useless margins.
I finally resorted to using wkhtmltopdf. It does the job, but needs a few tweaks. First, you have to add -T 0 -R 0 -B 0 -L 0 to remove the margins. Then, you have to use the file:// notation to target a local file. Also, it does not understand the css properties page-break-after nor page- break-before. I had to manually add padding in my elements to stop them from being cut in between two pages. But worst of all, it chokes on UTF-8 characters in filenames.
In the end, I wrote a small ruby wrapper around wkhtmltopdf to work around all those issues for me and called it html2pdf.
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