[gettalong]

What are you using to generate the PDFs? Are you doing something like PrinceXML (or weasyprint) which directly convert HTML+CSS to PDF? Or are you converting HTML+CSS to something else?

Are there any demo pages where it is possible to view the generated PDFs? I would imagine this would be easier to do since this is all based on Javascript.

[AugusteLef]

Good question !

For the generation we have an API that you can use npm @onedoc/client which allows you to do unlimited rendering with watermark, and some without the watermark to a certain limit. But you are also free to use any other software or API allowing this (PrinceXML is one of them. In our case we directly convert the bundle HTML/CSS to PDF and have 100% accuracy over the layout conversion (compare to chrome solution for example) as the open-source library react-print-pdf has been design to do that.

About the demo page, 2 choices if you use Onedoc API. 1. you can render your PDF and write it directly in you local machine --> so you can open it on your editor (VScode or whatever) and have side by side the code and the preview 2. you can render the PDF and host it on our cloud platform. You'll get a link to share it with others and you will also be able to preview it directly from our webapp.

Here is some links: API: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@onedoc/client Onedoc App: https://app.onedoclabs.com/login Documentation: 1) react-print-pdf https://react.onedoclabs.com/introduction 2) onedoc API: https://docs.onedoclabs.com/introduction

I hope it helps. let me know

[gettalong]

Thanks - that helps!

[Titou325]

We are using a wrapper around PrinceXML until we can move into a separate rendering engine. We want to be able to offer the same layout features of such an engine, hopefully much faster.

You can have a look at our (WIP) set of templates at https://react.onedoclabs.com/ui/templates where the images are automatically built from the PDFs themselves.

We are trying things out to see how we can make a live preview for development purposes but the challenges of pagination are quite hard to solve in an elegant way at the moment. We are experimenting with Taffy to see how it could fit our use case but this is still a very early tentative.

[gettalong]

Thanks for your answer! I imagined you would be using PrinceXML behind the scenes since that is probably the gold standard in HTML+CSS rendering.

The only open source alternative I know of is WeasyPrint at https://weasyprint.org/. I'm not sure how well it fares against PrinceXML, though.

And thanks for the pointer to Taffy - I didn't know it before!