How to convert modern HTML to PDF

Question

In 2016, the best way to convert HTML files to PDF from the command line was using wkhtmltopdf. Unfortunately, it seems that that is not really maintained anymore. It doesn't support a lot of things like flexbox.

One can use headless chrome/chromium to do it:

chrome --headless --print-to-pdf="path/to/pdf" https://your_url

but that has no options such as margins, paper type, control over header/footer, screen size, etc.

It appears that there is no plan to add those into headless chrome as command line options (one needs to use the dev tools interface): https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=603559#c89

How can one convert HTML files to PDF from the command line that gives control over how the document prints (margins, etc., from above), and supports modern html/css? Of course, once one can convert from the command line, you can also convert using a programming language of your choice.

Answer 1

Here is a command line tool that you can use to convert HTML pages to PDF just as they would be in chrome. Once you have it installed, you can use it with whatever programming language you want (Python, Java, PHP, etc.) to automatically generate PDFs from HTML web pages or documents. All of the dependencies should be well maintained well into the future, so it shouldn't have the same issues as things like wkhtmltopdf that were difficult to maintain.

URLs:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/chromehtml2pdf

https://github.com/dataverity/chromehtml2pdf

To install it, you'll need npm, and type:

npm install chromehtml2pdf

or to make it globally available to all users on the system

npm install -g chromehtml2pdf

Command line usage:

chromehtml2pdf --out=file.pdf --landscape=1 https://www.npmjs.com/package/chromehtml2pdf

For help (to view all possible options), type:

chromehtml2pdf --help

Feel free to make pull requests on github.