Converting HTML files to PDF [closed]

Answer 1

If you look at the side bar of your question, you will see many related questions...

In your context, the simpler method might be to install a PDF print driver like PDFCreator and just print the page to this output.

Answer 2

Check out iText; it is a pure Java PDF toolkit which has support for reading data from HTML. I used it recently in a project when I needed to pull content from our CMS and export as PDF files, and it was all rather straightforward. The support for CSS and style tags is pretty limited, but it does render tables without any problems (I never managed to set column width though).

Creating a PDF from HTML goes something like this:

Document doc = new Document(PageSize.A4);
PdfWriter.getInstance(doc, out);
doc.open();
HTMLWorker hw = new HTMLWorker(doc);
hw.parse(new StringReader(html));
doc.close();

Answer 3

Did you try WKHTMLTOPDF?

It's a simple shell utility, an open source implementation of WebKit. Both are free.

We've set a small tutorial here

EDIT( 2017 ):

If it was to build something today, I wouldn't go that route anymore.
But would use http://pdfkit.org/ instead.
Probably stripping it of all its nodejs dependencies, to run in the browser.

Answer 4

If you have the funding, nothing beats Prince XML as this video shows

Answer 5

The Flying Saucer XHTML renderer project has support for outputting XHTML to PDF. Have a look at an example here.

Answer 6

Is there maybe a way to grab the rendered page from the internet explorer rendering engine and send it to a PDF-Printer tool automatically?

This is how ActivePDF works, which is good means that you know what you'll get, and it actually has reasonable styling support.

It is also one of the few packages I found (when looking a few years back) that actually supports the various page-break CSS commands.

Unfortunately, the ActivePDF software is very frustrating - since it has to launch the IE browser in the background for conversions it can be quite slow, and it is not particularly stable either.

There is a new version currently in Beta which is supposed to be much better, but I've not actually had a chance to try it out, so don't know how much of an improvement it is.