pdfkit does not style pdfs

Question

I have a rails 3.1 app that creates pdf documents using pdfkit, and everything works as specified, except for the fact that the generated pdfs don't have any styling. I am assuming that wkhtmltopdf doesn't have access to my stylesheets and that it is not a larger issue than that. Would anyone have a clue as to how you would allow access to these stylesheets? I have basically followed railscast #220 on the subject, however I have had to create a new initializer to get pdfkit to work with rails 3.1.

This is the initializer that I had to use to get pdfkit to work with rails 3.1

ActionController::Base.asset_host = Proc.new { |source, request|
  if request.env["REQUEST_PATH"].include? ".pdf"
    "file://#{Rails.root.join('public')}"
  else
    "#{request.protocol}#{request.host_with_port}"
  end
 } 

The link to the pdf looks like this:

<%= link_to 'Download PDF', load_path(@load, :format => "pdf") %>

This will give me a link to the pdf that has no styling.

In my application.rb I have configured pdfkit as such:

config.middleware.use PDFKit::Middleware, :print_media_type => true

I have also added this to my layouts/application.html.erb file:

<%= stylesheet_link_tag    "application", :media => "all" %>

Answer 1

Stealing a couple of lines from the middleware code found at https://github.com/pdfkit/pdfkit/blob/master/lib/pdfkit/middleware.rb

You can use:

root = PDFKit.configuration.root_url || "#{env['rack.url_scheme']}://#{env['HTTP_HOST']}/"
html.gsub!(/(href|src)=(['"])\/([^\"']*|[^"']*)['"]/, '\1=\2' + root + '\3\2')

My example is:

html = render_to_string #render current action to string
root = PDFKit.configuration.root_url || "#{env['rack.url_scheme']}://#{env['HTTP_HOST']}/"
html.gsub!(/(href|src)=(['"])\/([^\"']*|[^"']*)['"]/, '\1=\2' + root + '\3\2')
kit = PDFKit.new(html, :print_media_type => true)

Answer 2

For me it was problem with installation for ubuntu. I just reinstalled from source:

# first, installing dependencies
sudo aptitude install openssl build-essential xorg libssl-dev

# for 64bits OS
wget http://wkhtmltopdf.googlecode.com/files/wkhtmltopdf-0.9.9-static-amd64.tar.bz2 
tar xvjf wkhtmltopdf-0.9.9-static-amd64.tar.bz2
mv wkhtmltopdf-amd64 /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf

# for 32bits OS
wget http://wkhtmltopdf.googlecode.com/files/wkhtmltopdf-0.9.9-static-i386.tar.bz2 
tar xvjf wkhtmltopdf-0.9.9-static-i386.tar.bz2
mv wkhtmltopdf-i386 /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf

And everything works now for me. So my advice is do not install wkhtmltopdf by this command sudo apt-get install wkhtmltopdf and install it from sources. Full instructions for installation process

Answer 3

I know you're looking for solution that will render whole page, just reminder for googling people that there is still problem free workaround

class DocumentController < ApplicationController

  def show
    @document = Document.last
    # ... implement your respond_to

    kit = PDFKit.new(@document.content, :page_size => 'Letter')
    kit.stylesheets << "#{Rails.root}/app/assets/stylesheets/pdf.css"
    send_data kit.to_pdf, :filename => "#{@document.title}.pdf", :type => 'application/pdf'
  end

end

now the pdf.css must be css, so teoretically if you need to load sass load it from pre-compiled public/assets/