How to use the browser's (chrome/firefox) HTML/CSS/JS rendering engine to produce PDF?

Question

There are nice projects that generate pdf from html/css/js files

1. http://wkhtmltopdf.org/ (open source)
2. https://code.google.com/p/flying-saucer/ (open

Answer 1

I'm not an expert but PhamtomJS seems to be the right tool for the job. I'm not sure though about what headless browser it uses underneath (I guess it is chrome/chromium)

var page = require('webpage').create();
page.open('http://github.com/', function() {
     var s = page.evaluate(function() {
         var body = document.body,
             html = document.documentElement;

        var height = Math.max( body.scrollHeight, body.offsetHeight, 
            html.clientHeight, html.scrollHeight, html.offsetHeight );
        var width = Math.max( body.scrollWidth, body.offsetWidth, 
            html.clientWidth, html.scrollWidth, html.offsetWidth );
        return {width: width, height: height}
    });

    console.log(JSON.stringify(s));

    // so it fit ins a single page
    page.paperSize = {
        width: "1980px",
        height: s.height + "px",
        margin: {
            top: '50px',
            left: '20px'
        }
    };

    page.render('github.pdf');
    phantom.exit();
});

Hope it helps.

Answer 2

Firefox has an API method for that: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/tabs/saveAsPDF

browser.tabs.saveAsPDF({})
  .then((status) => {
    console.log('PDF file status: ' + status);
  });

However, it seems to be available only for Browser Extensions, not to be invoked from a web page.

I'm still looking for a public API for that...