Creating PDFs of HTML

by Anton 7. November 2014 15:47

For our new time tracking web application (which not yet live) we need the functionality to create a PDF report. Since we use AngularJS to generate the HTML for the reports, I thought it would be nice to just convert that HTML via JavaScript into a PDF. The search for a solution pointed me to jsPDF – a pretty good tool for creating PDF via JavaScript. But its capabilites to convert HTML into PDF are limited (as of late 2014). We needed to convert a HTML table with all its styles into a PDF. I added jsPdfTablePlugin into the mix, but it still did not look good. So we abandonded the JavaScript way, and let the backend generate the PDF. I added an MVC view that displays the report, which is then captured via wkhtmltopdf. We already knew this process since we use it in our platform tool discoverize generating invoices. It works smoothly.

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Tags:

JavaScript | .NET | C# | PDF

About Oliver

shades-of-orange.com code blog logo I build web applications using ASP.NET and have a passion for javascript. Enjoy MVC 4 and Orchard CMS, and I do TDD whenever I can. I like clean code. Love to spend time with my wife and our children. My profile on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&A sites

About Anton

shades-of-orange.com code blog logo I'm a software developer at teamaton. I code in C# and work with MVC, Orchard, SpecFlow, Coypu and NHibernate. I enjoy beach volleyball, board games and Coke.