Pdf-Bot
Dev tools
pdf generation
SHOW HN2017
How HN took it
7 positive, 15 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 6 critical, out of 29 comments about the project. Thread score +0.09.
Execution: 1 for, 4 againstIdea: 1 for, 0 againstDesign: 0 for, 1 againstDocs: 1 for, 0 againstPerformance: 0 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Headless Chrome is more stable and accurate than wkhtmltopdf
From 2 comments
We actually used wkhtmltopdf before we started using pdf-bot. wkhtmltopdf development has slowed a lot, it is very unstable and you need to run a 2 year old alpha version to…
esbenp on HNwkhtmltopdf is a solid tool but its mostly abandoned now. rendering in chrome headless is way faster and more accurate. chrome headless though is lacking a lot of features that…
kyriakos on HN
Good documentation and architecture explanation
From 1 comment
Thank you very much. I'm excited to try it out. Great documentation, I wish more people would explain their project's software architecture in the README.
rmetzler on HN
Objections
Built-in queue is local to one process and won't scale across servers
From 1 comment
What's up with the built in queue? I feel like that belongs in a different script. For one, the built in nodeJS queue is useless in a multiple server environment. You'd still…
joshribakoff on HN
Chrome lacks CSS paged media, headers and footers, and good page breaks
From 2 comments
as far as I know wkhtmltopdf still exceeds in some aspects, better page control, margins, headers, footers and tables of contents. chrome still doesn't support them and also no…
kyriakos on HNHow well does it work with multiple-page PDFs? One of our banes is generating mixed text/image downloadable reports with sensible page breaks. To save time, we're actually doing…
flashman on HN
Requests
Support for CMYK color
From 1 comment
All I need now is CMYK support in Chrome and I can make HTML based print ready PDF rendering. That would be quite upgrade compared to my current options.
czechdeveloper on HN
Table of contents with page numbers
From 1 comment
Can it generate a table of contents with page numbers?
criddell on HN
Questions
How well does it handle multi-page PDFs and page breaks
From 1 comment
How well does it work with multiple-page PDFs? One of our banes is generating mixed text/image downloadable reports with sensible page breaks. To save time, we're actually doing…
flashman on HN
Whether it works on AWS Lambda
From 1 comment
Whould this work on AWS Lambda?
titel on HN
Alternatives named
Puppeteer
From 2 comments
Pretty cool! Check out Google's headless browser API Puppeteer too, they provide a few really useful functions for doing stuff like this.…
umpox on HNReally nice work. I've had a great experience working with Headless Chrome to convert webpages to PDF for my side project EmailThis (https://www.emailthis.me). It uses Puppeteer…
bharani_m on HN
wkhtmltopdf
From 2 comments
Just use WkhtmlToPdf https://wkhtmltopdf.org and wrap a simple service around it.
DonnyV on HNHow does this compare to wkhtmltopdf, which, IIRC, uses WebKit to render the pdf?
igitur on HN
Prince XML
From 2 comments
Unfortunately, Chrome's kerning when it comes to printing is atrocious. Over the years, I've constantly tested it every once in a while with the hope that it would improve to no…
oxplot on HNPrinceXML does a solid job of it, and has for years.
cpr on HN
athenapdf
From 2 comments
This is interesting :-) I am currently using athenapdf[1] but I will have a play with pdf-bot. [1] https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf
gbuk2013 on HNCore developer of `athenapdf` here :) I had a quick look at `pdf-bot`, and though we both rely on the same underlying technology (we are only just moving to headless Chromium; we…
MrSaints on HN