CSS Paged Media

An overview of toolchains that can generate PDFs using CSS Paged Media.

Toolchains

Tool	CSS	XSL-FO	PDF Engine	List Price	Issues
fop	✕	✓	fop,batik	Free	Complex styling; No HTML+CSS, bad SVG rasterization
wkhtmltopdf	✓	✕	webkit,poppler	Free	No CSS3 column support, bad SVG rasterization
puppeteer	✓	✕	chromium,skia	Free	No PDF bookmarks
AntennaHouse	✓	✓	AntennaHouse	$5000/server	Expensive
PDFreactor	✓	✕	PDFreactor	$2950/server	Expensive
PrinceXML	✓	✓	PrinceXML	$3800/server	Expensive
DocRaptor	✓	✕	PrinceXML	$0.025-0.0090/doc	SaaS
WeasyPrint	✓	✕	WeasyPrint	Free	Limited CSS3 column support

• Chromium PDF issue: Blink should use the new (2017) Skia API.
  • 607777 - “save as PDF” doesn’t generate a 508 compliance PDF
  • 738643 - Blink text layout should attach original text to SkTextBlobs
  • 781797 - Feature request PDF bookmarks/outlines
  • 988352 - Fonts rendering wrong after PDF printing

PlantUML

• PlantUML : Open-source tool that uses simple textual descriptions to draw UML diagrams.
  • plantuml/plantuml : Generate UML diagram from textual description
  • plantuml/plantuml-server : PlantUML server
• plantuml/plantuml-server : Official docker image of PlantUML server over Jetty or Tomcat.
• Wikipedia: PLantUML : “PlantUML is an open-source tool allowing users to create UML diagrams from a plain text language.”

References

• DocBook xslt10-stylesheets
  • Release 1.79.2
• Why You Should Be Using XSLT 3.0 - A look at the upcoming XSLT 3.0 release, and why it matters beyond the XML community. February 14, 2017, XML.com
• yEd - Graph Editor : yEd - Graph Editor