I display receipt in both HTML and printer-friendly version. HTML version does jQuery tabs, etc, while printer-friendly has zero scripts and external dependencies, no master layout, no additional buttons, inline CSS, and can be saved as HTML without problems.
Since I use Spark View Engine, I though maybe it’s a good idea to generate PDF using iTextSharp engine. But after few paragraphs I decided it’s too cumbersome, because a) I would have to rewrite entire receipt (source Spark view is about 5 pages long) b) I had problems with iTextSharp from beginning – for example, numbered lists kept bulleted, with no indentation, and indentationLeft=”20″ didn’t work – maybe because of lack of documentation, but see (a).
So, my requirements for PDF are very simple: I want to keep the same HTML but insert page breaks between individual receipts (yes I have several ones in a single document).
Is there a simple way to generate PDF from view/HTML without rewriting the view using a strange half-documented engine?
UPDATE: tried community HTMLDoc version; didn’t use my inline CSS styles, incorrectly displayed Unicode symbols for currencies. wkhtmltopdf did pick the CSS but failed for currency symbol; I suppose there’s problem with encoding solved by setting charset to utf-8. wkhtmltopdf seems to be nice but I’m yet to figure out how to set page breaks…
Finally used wkhtmltopdf which works fine when I set encoding, I found out how to setup page breaks, and it processes my CSS very nice. On issue is that it can’t correctly process stdin/out in Windows version (don’t remember if it’s in or out that doesn’t work) – may be fixed in recent versions, but I’m ok with temp files.