Transforming HTML to PDF

There's probably no Tcl-specific content to this page.

People often have need of PDF output. This is generally regarded as a difficult format to write programmatically. One convenient way to begin to work with PDF is to achieve it as a transform from HTML. Several tools change HTML to PDF, including:

  • HTMLDOC - A commercially supported version is here: [L1 ]
    For an open source version of the same program, look here [L2 ]
  • Apache FOP [L3 ] - actually that's XML/XHTML -> XML-FO -> PDF
  • HTML2PDF [L4 ]
    D. McC Dead link for HTML2PDF--12/8/2004
  • My Personal favourite: Use html2ps [L5 ] to go from html to PostScript and then the standard ps2pdf [L6 ] program. You get a pdf with intra-page links working. VI
  • Bottle Neck [L7 ] is a converter HTML->TeX, written in Tcl. If you take PDFlatex, the effect is HTML->PDF.
  • wkhtmltopdf [L8 ] comes with many command line options as well as a C library to link into your programs.

I wonder whether something using tclxml and pdflib (or pdf4tcl) might be able to be written to do this transformation.


For more references, see [L9 ].