PDF

General

• PDF is a completely different technology than for example HTML. Thus to produce quality PDF documents, use LaTeX or other applications. HTML is not well suited for PDF creation.

Tools for working with PDF files

• app-text/mbtpdfasm allows you to extract parts of a PDF document like this:

mbtPdfAsm -morigin-file.pdf -p"7;8;9;10" -ddestination-file.pdf

• app-text/pdftk (PDF Toolkit) also looks interesting for these kinds of manipulations.

Converting from (X)HTML + CSS

• Converting an HTML document to a PDF one is not easy. HTML should not be chosen as a view technology if you need to output to a PDF or print your document. However, various libraries still exist to convert an HTML document to PDF.

• Be sure to choose a large font size in your HTML document. I set a base font-size on the body equal to 20px. Use relative font-sizes in your XHTML document (eg, font-size: 0.85em;).

HTML2PDF

• This PHP library (coming from a Perl port) is excellent. It can convert remarkably well XHTML documents with CSS properties. However, it has the following caveats:
  • Make sure your CSS is perfectly valid. Sometimes you will need to specify a clear property explicitely. With a bit of effort, your output document will be very close to the original Firefox rendering.
  • Be careful with images. html2pdf does not support transparency. You should also use high quality (very large) images in your HTML document, giving its actual size via the CSS properties.
  • You can use either the FPDF or PDFLIB libraries to output to PDF. I tried both but did not see any noticeable differences (although the pdflib package must be installed separately in Gentoo).
• Home page for this project. Several other projects exist in PHP but I don't know if they handle CSS 2.1 correctly.