DocRaptor Blog

I've built a SaaS service that generates PDFs, and I've just added an HTML/CSS editor for this purpose [1]. It uses Liquid templates and SASS. After you set up all of the fields, you can just post data to a simple API. We also provide an online form that people can fill out. If you just need to post your own HTML/CSS and get a PDF, then I'd recommend DocRaptor [2]. [1] https://formapi.io/templates/tpl_mFAsZEmhCtG9FX5N/edit [2] https://docraptor.com

Checkout https://docraptor.com/ - it's great - is commercial but affordable.

Docraptor, http://docraptor.com It uses the Prince engine (http://www.princexml.com/), so it supports paging, headers, footers, page numbers etc. in addition to standard HTML+CSS3. It's great overall but quite pricey.

If you're looking for a way to do this programmatically, I'd recommend[1] DocRaptor (http://docraptor.com/). It uses Prince to do the conversion. It's not free, though. [1] Full disclosure: I know the guys behind DocRaptor. It's probably a great service without my bias, but there's almost definitely some bias.

It sounds like this is as advanced as DocRaptor[1]. They have what I consider to be the best PDF generation API, giving complete control over the documents you need to create. The pricing is similar. If you'd rather do it for free weasyprint[2] is the best open source alternative. Another more affordable option you might want to consider is Urlbox[3]. (Disclosure: I work on this) Urlbox's rendering engine is based on Chrome. It's been refined over the last 11 years to render pages as images or PDFs[4] that look great. I was a customer for 5 years before I joined the team. Everything we'd tried before Urlbox was a disappointment. Urlbox probably can't match the power of either Onedoc or DocRaptor, but pricing starts at less than $0.01 per document and drops significantly with scale. If your PDF looks great when saving as PDF in Chrome it should look identically brilliant with Urlbox. [1]: https://docraptor.com [2]: https://weasyprint.org [3]: https://urlbox.com [4]: https://urlbox.com/html-to-pdf

Docraptor https://docraptor.com/ is a monthly subscription service that uses Prince under the hood. It can be a cheaper option (though I wish for a PAYG model).

DocRaptor is PrinceXML as a service with reasonable pricing. https://docraptor.com

We're mostly web developers so we designed our complex shipping invoices in HTML and ran them through DocRaptor's API https://docraptor.com for many years with beautiful results at a reasonable cost. Eventually other teams in our organization started doing the same so we paid a few thousand bucks for the package DocRaptor uses in the backend https://www.princexml.com and run it locally.

I'm a developer at https://docraptor.com. We're an official Prince partner with a SaaS pricing model, but we've got a separate JavaScript engine for that very reason.

It is tedious to code the layout and design of the PDF using code libraries such as FPDF, Prawn etc. I recently used Prince[1] to generate a PDF version of a web-based book. The PDF needed to be suitable for professional printing (crop marks, bleed, trim, etc.). Prince was the only solution I could find that came even close to being adequate for the job, and it exceeded my expectations. Creating the HTML for Prince wasn't tedious at all. It was almost a pleasure because Prince includes better support for print-related CSS3 properties than any rendering engine I've encountered. There's a web-based service named DocRaptor[2] that is powered by Prince. [1] http://www.princexml.com/ [2] http://docraptor.com/

Have you seen docraptor? http://docraptor.com/ They have a heroku addon as well.

Thanks! The current Dino theme was intentionally silly because it was for a contest. :) I'm in the process of making it an actual product, including rebranding it. Still with a dinosaur theme for now, but more like http://docraptor.com in terms of professionalism. If people use it, I might rebranded it yet again based on feedback.

I think I'd really enjoy the read. It would have been a bit nicer if the great comments were accompanied by some good design/typesetting (generate latex?) and an alternative format (epub). There are a few solutions based on princeXML that can take easily generatable HTML+CSS and convert it to pdf (example: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/boom ). While the Prince license might not be the cheapest, there also is a webservice that does the conversion (http://docraptor.com/tour)

For my technical book, I was getting frustrated with the page breaks interrupting the code sections in weird places. There's a bit of a hack you can do to create a continuous single-page PDF if you're generating your book from html/css: @page { size: 216mm 17600mm; } That tells the PDF printer to make the page 8.5 inches wide and really really long. It's dirty, but it works! Derek Sivers said this about it when I sent him a copy: "I love that continuous-page PDF format. Never seen that before, but it's so much handier than artificial pages." For my upcoming book, I'm releasing both a page-breaks and a continuous version of the PDF. http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-ansible.htm… The continuous PDF doesn't work well in some PDF readers, so unfortunately I have to also provide a version with page breaks. ## Full Setup For the curious, here's the rest of my setup: I'm using Jekyll so I can just do everything in markdown/html/css. It uses pygments for the syntax highlighting and I'm using my own customized syntax coloring styles. Then I use PrinceXML for generating the pdf. It makes for a nice workflow... First I start the jekyll server with the --watch flag so it will auto-recompile the html: jekyll serve --watch Then I use PrinceXML to generate the pdf: prince http://0.0.0.0:4000/breaks-no.html -o breaks-no.pdf If I want to have the pdf auto-generated too, I use fswatch (OSX utility similar to inotifywatch): …

It's not cheap, but if you run it on a single server, you can use it for as many projects as you like. Apparently someone made a hosted SaaS version, though, which might be affordable if you don't produce a lot of pages: https://docraptor.com/signup.

They were expecting to do $60m in 2014 - http://www.sramanamitra.com/2014/07/11/bootstrapping-a-web-hosting-com… I know we left them 4 years ago because how they implement bandwidth caps on private IPs, which a few years later another company also had the same problem with and nicely wrote it up on their blog: https://docraptor.com/blog/gone-in-60-seconds-how-we-moved-from-linode… Linode's attempt to keep us (spending $5k a month at the time, but we've grown substantially with AWS now. Linode were at $22m in 2011, so we'd have been 0.3% of their total revenue): "We will certainly be sorry to see you go." That may just be because they were fed up of us after we opened 27 support tickets about the same networking issue over the course of 11 months though.