Changing HTML to Report machinery

Technical Proposals
1

I just run into a tool to generate PDF’s from HTML. I found out that Odoo is using it to generate reports in PDF format or images.

This is the web page: wkhtmltopdf.org
This is the GitHub repository: https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf

I haven’t had time to check it deeply, but I would like let you know about this tool.

I know @ramonski is working on a new report machinery, I don’t want to put more work on him, but maybe he finds this library useful…? Could this tool speed up reporting process and optimize memory usage?

2

Hi @Espurna, yes, I’ve seen wkhtmltopdf as well and considered it as the backend for senaite.publisher.

However, generating the PDF is not the problem, but to generate a preview that looks like the final PDF.

This was the reason I decided to use WeasyPrint, because it is able to generate PNGs and is better maintained at the moment.

Nevertheless, senaite.publisher has a capable system to hook publication backend in, see here: https://github.com/senaite/senaite.publisher/blob/master/src/senaite/publisher/publisher.py
So once it is done, we can try to integrate wkhtmltopdf as well.

3

Oh, I understand. I like the idea of senaite.published capable to hook different tools. Thank you for your work on that! :+1: