What's the development status of wkhtmltopdf?

[David Cook]

Hi all:

I've been using wkhtmltopdf for a little while now, but I'm still a bit confused as to whether or not it is actively being developed. Having now seen your recent posts here, I can't help but think that it is.

However, if that's the case, why is the last news item on https://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/ from 2012? Why does the last static binary look like it dates back to 2011?

If I look at github (https://github.com/antialize/wkhtmltopdf), I see that there has been code committed four months ago. Does that mean that people are developing the code and then just compiling their own binaries? 

[Ryan]

On Monday, June 17, 2013 5:10:39 PM UTC-7, David Cook wrote:

Hi all:

I've been using wkhtmltopdf for a little while now, but I'm still a bit confused as to whether or not it is actively being developed. Having now seen your recent posts here, I can't help but think that it is.

Most (all) development is by Jakob, and he has limited time to work on this (and is probably burnt out, a common occurrence when open source projects get popular and the bug count goes up).

However, if that's the case, why is the last news item on https://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/ from 2012? Why does the last static binary look like it dates back to 2011?

Partly because WebKit/Qt no longer support static linking (search forum for 'static'). Also from my own experience there's been regression in the output, so output is worse than it used to be.

If I look at github (https://github.com/antialize/wkhtmltopdf), I see that there has been code committed four months ago. Does that mean that people are developing the code and then just compiling their own binaries? 

Unfortunately that's probably correct. I personally had to get code changes from the PhantomJS project and apply them to this project to build statically.

So I think going forward, this project needs help from people to...
1) Fix the build steps so it's as easy to build as PhantomJS (which builds statically a single exe).
2) This project needs a test suite as part of it so that regression can be caught.
3) Fix the major bugs on the latest 4.8.x branch
4) make a new release