I am currently using weasyprint to convert a HTML template to pdf. Now my company has decided to move from python to javascript for increased user experience or something.
Is there a PDF renderer in JavaScript that can do the following:
Use data on the client. I have data that under no circumstances can be transferred over the internet. (That is the reason I can not create the pdf on backend side or use external renderers.)
Use CSS page numbering
Use features like page headers and footers on print medium.
And of course can do the usual CSS layout.
Ideally there is something that can be used in python and javascript. But Weasyprint works great with python, so I can keep that if there is no "one tool to do the job everywhere".
I'm building a website where people can pick several pictures from a range.
I then want the users to be able to create a PDF using those pictures. However I want those pictures inserted in predefined positions and sizes in a template I have already created which will contain other predone materials (words pictures etc).
So my question :
its possible ?
Can anyone recommend a library which will satisfy my needs, I have had a look and I cant see any PDF libraries that seem to mention templates
Any guidance on where to start will be greatly appreciated.
Yes, this is completely possible.
I would recommend using wkhtmltopdf to generate the pdfs from an html template.
Another handy library for this kind of work is image.intervention
Both of these would work with PHP.
If you're working in javaScript you may want to use PDFKit
Edited: Only if you use php.
There are several libraries you can use to generate a pdf depending on what template you will build your pdf. I hardly recommend TCPDF. You can use html to layout the design you want or you can embed the image directly on a page. See an example here.
I've looked on google for the ways to do this. I've found a lot of non maintained libraries. There doesn't seem to be any "fresh" information about this.
I need to generate my PDF on the server side. I'll have dynamic data.
Is the way to go still with PhantomJS?
Yes ,you can use pdfkit library for pdf generation in node js.
i am also using the same library for pdf generation.
visit https://www.npmjs.com/package/pdfkit .
or https://github.com/devongovett/pdfkit/blob/master/demo/browser.js
or
http://pdfkit.org/demo/browser.html
Would it be possible to use the inbuilt Javascript in adobe pdf forms to get contents/scrape a web page?
When I googled if Javascript could do this there where CSP errors,
but pdf forms does not have this as far as I know.
thanks,
g3
As you suspected, it is not possible to achieve this with Acrobat's Javascript extensions.
There are a number of third party tools that can convert a website to a pdf. If you also need to build a form, rather than just convert a webpage, you could write a program that would leverage a third party conversion tool, then build the form using Acrobat's Interapplication Communication API reference. If you're more comfortable with Javascript, you could even use the PDDoc's JSObject to build the form with Javascript.
You could use the wkhtmltopdf tool to get the HTML Content of a website and save it to a PDF
Then you can simply run
wkhtmltopdf http://google.com google.pdf to get the Content of Google.com and save it to the PDF "google.pdf".
It is possible. Check out the methods of Net.HTTP found in the "JavaScript for Acrobat API Reference". You might find a more recent version of the reference here.
I have an HTML page which has a flash chart(FusionCharts) and HTML table. I need to convert this whole thing into Excel. HTML table should be displayed in cells of excel sheet. Flash chart can be displayed as an image.
Is there any open source API that we could use for achieving this. Could you let me know what are the possible options.
Can this be done by using javascript alone.
The HTML table is relatively easy. You can download the page, parse the HTML (there are various HTML parsing libraries available), extract the table and convert it into CSV (which Excel can load), or directly create an Excel file, e.g. using Java POI, as suggested above.
The Flash part is significantly harder. There are quite a few tools available to capture flash to an image, you'd need to use one of them. This can be tricky, as Flash might be interactive, so you'd possibly have to remote-control the Flash part so it shows the right image before capturing. Hard to tell without more info.
That said, screen-scraping (which is what you're doing) is always labour-intensive and fragile. You should really push for a better interface to get your data from, it will save loads of hassle in the long run.
Just set the content type of the page to "application/vnd.ms-excel". If the html page is just a table it will open with excel and look perfect. You can even add background colors and font styles.
Try some of these content types
application/excel
application/vnd.ms-excel
application/x-excel
application/x-msexcel
Excel can convert HTML tables by default. The easiest way to force it to do this is to save the HTML file with an XLS extension. Excel will then open the XLS as if it were its native workbook.
There's a very good Java POI api that would let you do that, but it's Java.
http://poi.apache.org/
If you're on Win32 you can also use Excel's COM api, there are quite a few tutorials on the net.
I cannot offer any advice on the Flash part, but I have done HTML table to Excel many times. Yes, Excel can open HTML tables but most HTML tables out there have extraneous crap in them that can make it fragile to consistently parse the tables.
CPAN module HTML::TableExtract is a wonderful module that allows you to focus on the non-presentation specific aspects of the table you are trying to extract. Just specify the column headings you are interested in and maybe specify the title or class of the table and you are mostly set. You might have to post process the rows returned a little, but that is considerably easier than dealing with the underlying tag soup in all its glory.
Further, for output to Excel format, stick with Spreadsheet::WriteExcel rather than the OLE interface. That way, you do not depend on having Excel installed for your program to work and things go a little faster.
Make sure you specify the data type of cells if you do not want content to be changed automatically by Excel upon opening the files (another reason I do not like sending around CSV files). Use a configuration file for formatting information so that you can change how the spreadsheet looks without having to change the program.
You can always use Excel's built-in charting facilities to replace the web site graphs.
This combination has enabled me to generate pretty good looking documents comprising several hundreds of megabytes of scraped data (with logos and image links etc) using just a few hundred lines of Perl and a couple of days' work.
What you're trying to do is fragile and difficult to maintain. You should attempt to create a csv feed to fetch the data. All it takes is for someone to come along and modify the HTML and your scraper will throw up on it (probably years after anyone remembers how your program works).
Try to get CSV and image data from the original source (ie, database or whatever) and build the Excel file from that.
I will add to SpliFF's answer that when you have your data as a CSV file you can set the mime type of the page to application/vnd.ms-excel which will open the page in Excel