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Creating PDF from HTML on Debian Bookworm; tools?
I am on a Debian Bookworm Docker image. My Rails6 project needs to convert HTML files to PDF. I used to do this with wkhtmltopdf, but wkhtmltopdf has not been supported for a long time now, and I want to update. I have tried using headless Chrome, but this is not a solution since it (a) contains bugs that cause parts of the HTML to be omitted, and there are one-page HTML files that even cause headless Chrome to outright crash; and (b) it's a very, very wonky installation. Right now I can't install headless Chrome on Bookworm because it can't find libasound2:amd64.
What else can I do? I tried Pandoc, but it uses an intermediate library for generating PDFs which I also find pretty wonky... pdfroff doesn't work at all and do I really need to install LaTeX?
I've been requesting my client to use a service provider such as nutrient.io, but as I generate files with confidential data, uploading our HTML files to an unknown destination isn't really something we want either.
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The following users marked this post as Works for me:
| User | Comment | Date |
|---|---|---|
| plain_toast | (no comment) | Dec 9, 2025 at 12:35 |
If you can include more CSS, there are several tools listed under https://print-css.rocks/#heading-11 which helps to get everything printed correctly.
If not, try out https://github.com/plutoprint/plutobook
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I originally didn't bother to mention it because I have typically used it from Pandoc, making it equivalent to LaTeX. However, Weasyprint both works as Pandoc's alternative HTML-to-PDF path and runs standalone, as weasyprint input.html output.pdf, plus assorted options if you need something more sophisticated.
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