how mature is HTML+CSS now in relation to generating reports for printing?

Question

I'm considering creating all the reports of a series of desktop business apps directly to html. Most of the reports are tables (maybe compound reports), headers, footers, etc. (no images, vector graphics, etc.).

After a search in SO, I've read lots of post regarding problems with page breaks and things like that (I don't need pixel positioning at all, but yes control at page breaks).

For example, let's say I have a big table with currency values and I need the last row of the table per page to display the running totals at that point.. it is something feasible to do easily or I will run in lots of trouble?

What technologies can help me here?

• HTML5
• Javascript
• CSS
• PHP Librarys
• JQuery

Some notes:

• The html will be displayed with the chrome or firefox engine embeded, so the diferences between browsers it's not a problem for me.
• I can have the php preprocessor embedded if that helps to generate more easily the reports, I'm just looking fot the best technology at hand to make the work well..
• I'm tired of report generators with "WYSIWYG" designers (Crystal Report, FastReport, ReportBuilder, etc.)

Thanks!

Answer 1

We made the exact move you're thinking about almost a year ago and haven't looked back. Most communication with our client is over the web, so it's been a perfect fit. They can view html outputs easily on our website, and can generate pdf's of the page (server side) whenever necessary. The program we use for pdf conversion is a free, easy-to-use, open-source project called wkhtmltopdf.

Where we are is great, but getting here was difficult.

Deciding which pdf engine to use was a long, painful process. The short of it is that HTML is for viewing pages on the internet, not for viewing pages on paper. Page-breaks will be the bane of your existence in this game -- you literally have to measure each page and create your own clean-looking breaks for every single report (otherwise, all html-to-pdf converters out there will just keep rendering the document onto the next page as it if encountered no page-break at all). Further complicating the matter is that every html-to-pdf engine out there handles this sh*t differently and you'll have to write a tailored solution to test each one to see if it meets your individual needs.

Now, the good news:

You can save yourself a lot of trouble by heeding my advice and going with wkhtmltopdf for your finalized reporting outputs. This little program is simply amazing -- it uses a webkit engine, renders CSS/javascript accurately, has header/footer control, optionally creates a table-of-contents page, and (most importantly) consistently produces excellent looking pdf's without having to customize your code base. It also has a variety of great command line switches, and it is very, very fast. I say again: it is very, very fast.

Best of all, it's a command line tool that can be used in batch processing. And did I mention that it's really, really fast?

Answer 2

Browser support for printing is generally terrible. However, there are other tools, notably Prince (which is not free) and Flying Saucer (which is free) that can generate PDF output from XML/HTML plus CSS. Prince even supports JavaScript though I don't have any experience with it.

I've got a Java back end in my current application, so for me Flying Saucer works fine for simple reports. I pre-process an HTML template with FreeMarker and then run the result through Flying Saucer. It's got a surprisingly smart rendering engine.

The CSS3 Paged Media spec (well, proposed spec) has all sorts of cool stuff in it but they're almost totally unimplemented in the browsers. Even the CSS2 paged media stuff is only supported half-heartedly.