HTML to PDF

My goal for today was to add support for building PDF documents of my Resume.

But getting Jekyll to play nicely with PDF generation was a bit more involved than I had hoped. Here’s what did and didn’t work for me.

Didn’t Work

I started off using pandoc in a couple of different ways. First attempt was to generate PDF documents from the built HTML files.

Getting pandoc required LaTeX, which I installed using homebrew:

brew install basictex
brew install texlive
brew install pandoc

Then, I tried running it on the HTML file built by Jekyll:

bundle exec jekyll b
pandoc -s --pdf-engine=xelatex _site/resume/index.html -o resume.pdf

The problem with this build was that it messed up the masthead / navbar header when rendering the PDF.

I also tried using a live server, but it had the same problem:

pandoc -s --pdf-engine=xelatex http://127.0.0.1:4000/about/resume/index.html -o resume.pdf

Worked

Rather than continuing down the pandoc route, I decided to try wkhtmltopdf. I installed the pre-compiled binary from wkhtmltopdf/downloads and generated the document as follows:

wkhtmltopdf http://127.0.0.1:4000/about/resume/index.html --no-images resume.pdf

It was only after writing this that I realized how old wkhtmltopdf is. Next time, I’ll give weasyprint a try.