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Ask HN: How to generate a pdf for website?

3 points by ai_ia ↗ HN
Hello,

I am very new to web site development and currently building a website, using react, which teaches online using text/gifs. At the end of the course, I would like to generate a sort of pdf book customized with the user inputs that are spread over the course.

Now, I would like a better design for the book and earlier for one of my own personal project, I used tufte-latex and loved the experience. I have searched for solutions online, but the highly recommended PhantomJS is not really easy to pick up.

Can anyone prime me about setting up a pdf generator using latex or any other suitable solution?

I expect around 3k users at least and some initial traction for people interested in the website.

Thanks and Regards ai_ia

6 comments

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pwg
One "other suitable solution" could be to use Quickscript (http://quickscript.sourceforge.net/index.html). It is a Postscript based document formatter. The markup format it uses is relatively straighforward. You would output a suitable "qs" file, and then feed the document formatting code plus the "qs" file through ghostscript to generate a pdf.
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osullivj
If you're building your backend in Python with Django or Tornado you could use ReportLab's open source PDF generator [1]. ReportLab's founder, Andy Robinson was Mark Hammond's co author on Python Programming for Win32.

[1] http://www.reportlab.com/opensource/

ai_ia
I looked at ReportLab. Have you used it before in any project? I really want to make the pdfs beautiful looking. Is ReportLab comparable to Latex?
osullivj
I have used ReportLab; it's easy to use and the results look good. Never used Latex, so can't comment on that.
anilgulecha
pdfjs if an option if you want to generate it on the browser (clientside).