Programmatically creating PDF from webpage

Question

I have my resume online in an html page (www.mysite.com/resume.html). Every time I need a PDF version of it, I use Google Chrome's print dialog to save it as a PDF, which uses my print CSS stylesheet.

I want to be able to navigate to www.mysite.com/resume.pdf to always have an up to date PDF version without having to go through Google Chrome manually. Is there a way to programmatically and automatically create a resume.pdf from resume html? If I can write a script that runs once every 24 hours or something like that, that would be good.

Answer 1

Chrome has started headless program.

With that, we can create a pdf. e.g. for windows navigate your commandline to

C:\Users\{{your_username}}\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome SxS\Application>

Then hit the command:

chrome --headless --print-to-pdf="d:\\{{path and file name}}.pdf" https://google.com

Answer 2

PhantomJS is perfect for this. It invokes an instance of WebKit from the command line which can then be used to output to file such as PDF.

PhantomJS:

http://phantomjs.org/

Specific instructions for exporting screen output to a file:

http://phantomjs.org/screen-capture.html

e.g.:

phantomjs rasterize.js 'http://www.example.com/resume.html' resume.pdf