Pisa is really bad and buggy- Try wkhtml2pdf instead

[MichaelF]

I figured that the canonical test of a lib like this is to do Google.com. It failed miserably. Actually, it crashed and I got nothing.

Much better:

WK HTML to PDF

http://wkhtmltopdf.org/downloads.html

It was able to do google.com almost perfectly (something messed up b/c of a bad path or whatever). My simple HTML template rendered flawlessly -- it just needs to be shrunken a bit b/c everything looks too big on the PDF page.

Sadly it is written in C, not python.

[Raoul Snyman]

Are you one of the authors of WK HTML to PDF? That's the only reason I can think of for you to come to this list and slate this software without any real "evidence".

Instead of being negative and then promoting an alternative with very weak reasoning, why don't you at least provide a traceback from when Pisa crashed? It would be much more useful to the project and the community, and someone might even be able to fix it.

In addition to this, you don't seem to understand what xhtml2pdf is designed for. It's not meant for rendering web pages, it is meant for rendering *documents*. In this particular case, you need to use Pisa's subset of HTML and CSS to layout and style your document. It is largely equivalent to rst2pdf which uses reStructuredText as a document layout language.

In future I recommend you understand the goal of the software you're using and the problem it is trying to solve before posting a poorly substantiated rant to the mailing list.

P.S. I'm just another user, I am in no way affiliated with the development of xhtml2pdf. I am just rather sick of people being negative about open source projects without at least trying to help solve the problem.

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[MichaelF]

Dear Raoul,

Naw, I'm not an author of WK. I'm just a developer. A pragmatic one: I have some html templates to render to pdf and xhtml2pdf barfed all over the screen and the pdf did not resemble the code *at*all*. It renders perfectly in all major browsers... On the other hand, WK got pretty damn close to rendering correctly.

You say you want something useful? I gave you the friggin repro steps! Go see it fail for yourself. Download Google.html and run it thru the lib. What more do you expect! "Evidence"? Just go try it and you'll get all the "proof" you need. I'm just trying to let you guys know it doesn't work.

Designed for? The name is XHTML TO PDF for christsake. It should render html into a pdf. That's what it clearly claims to do in the README. HTML 5 and even a little CSS 3, fancy that! Are you trying to tell me this isn't the purpose of the software? Gimme a break.

In the future I recommend you don't get butt hurt when one of your adorable little libraries doesn't live up to expectations. Pragmatism is a virtue. Build something that works or try something else you're more capable of doing. And I hope you try learning how to take an issue report like an adult - try addressing the issue instead of complaining about the reporter being negative and hurting your little ol' feelings.

Peace.

[Pjotr]

I apologise if I hurt anyones feelings or something up front. but here goes.

The critics is always good, but one should provide a code example to be used by others to reproduce the issue and not start screaming pointlessly (it could be pointed out that the biggest butt hurt issue lies with initiator of this thread).

Yes, this library does have a lot of issues and limitations. If you are using or are planning on using it, then just help iron these out. If not, then it is probably for the best if one moved on to some place else.

I am sorry if I promote anything. This would probably give you the best result with the easiest setup and would also allow you to do a great deal of magic in addition to just capturing the page: http://phantomjs.org/api/webpage/method/render.html

It should give close to perfect result for the page you mentioned.

Have fun.

P.S. For your information, the original author of the library is no longer maintaining it (I could be wrong but even a few maintainers have changed since then). The time passes and new and better things emerge, but that does not mean that one could go insulting others because he/she/it spent a few minutes and the result was unsatisfying.

[Raoul Snyman]

Wow. I get this diatribe, and apparently I'm the butthurt one...