Weasy Print

Weasyprint is a python library, for creating PDF documents from HTML + CSS documents.

It supports CSS 2.1 Specification, including the Paged media properties, making one the best tools around to produce PDF documents from HTML + CCS.

Documentation

http://weasyprint.org/

https://weasyprint.readthedocs.io

Installing weasyprint

Follow the installation instructions in https://weasyprint.readthedocs.io/en/stable/install.html

Install dependencies

On Mac: You need to have brew installed.

Then run

echo -e "export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8\nexport LANG=en_US.UTF-8" >> ~/.bash_profile

brew install cairo pango gdk-pixbuf libxml2 libxslt libffi

On Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libxslt-dev libffi-dev libcairo2-dev libpango1.0-dev 

After installing Weasyprint dependencies, for your operating system

Install WeasyPrint

Install Weasyprint using Python package installed: pip (how to install pip)

pip3 install WeasyPrint

Testing Weasy Print

At the first glance Weasy Print sounds promising, so why not try to see how well does it performs conversions from HTML to PDF?

The following PDF results from the conversion of the Beyond Social's article Eiland van Brienenoord onto a PDF using Weasy Print.

The CSS style-sheet that gave origin the PDF is located at the end of this page

Running

The standalone command weasyprint can produce a PDF, simply with the instructions:

weasyprint EilandvanBrienenoord.html -s style.css ouput.pdf

Where:

• EilandvanBrienenoord.html - is the souce HTML file (could also be a URL)
• -s - is the option for a CSS stylesheet
• ouput.pdf - the resulting PDF

@page

@page CSS rule that determines orientation and page size is successfully rendered in the PDF.

@page {
size: A5 portrait;
}

@page left @page right

Option for the left and right pages, such as the margin sizes, which have to alternate in order to produce a bound work, are correctly rendered.

@page:right {
  margin-left: 3cm; /*inner margin*/
  margin-right:1cm; /*outer margin*/ 
}

@page:left {
  margin-right: 3cm; /*inner margin*/
  margin-left:1cm; /*outer margin*/
}

@bottom

Weasy-print also applies consistently @bottom rules, including page counting.

  @bottom-right {
    margin: 10pt 0 30pt 0;
    border-top: .25pt solid #FF05F6;
    content: "Testing WeasyPrint";
    font-size: 6pt;
    color: #00FFF2;
  }

  @bottom-center {
    margin: 10pt 0 30pt 0;
    content: counter(page);
    font-size: 6pt;
  }

CSS Custom Fonts

Weasy Print does not support CSS's (@font-face) rule.

Yet it can use fonts available in your system.

On Linux `fc-list` will give you a list of fonts installed in your system

Imposition

There is no mechanism to performs page impositions.

However, it is possible to perform imposition over the Weasy Print-generated PDF with software such as BookletImposer, jPDF Tweak, pdftool, or PDFtk.

More is needed

These tests and prototypes are far from exhaustive.

It is still unclear whether Weasy Print, CSS and HTML can produce quality PDFs, ready to be sent to a printer in order to produce paper-bound publication. Yet the results seem promising.

More experimentation, prototypes, and feedback is needed in order to make a informed critique.

And contributions to Weasy Print, can only help.

CSS style-sheet

@page {
size: A5 portrait;
}

@page:right {
  margin-left: 3cm; /*inner*/
  margin-right:1cm; /*outer*/ 
  
  @bottom-right {
    margin: 10pt 0 30pt 0;
    border-top: .25pt solid #FF05F6;
    content: "Testing WeasyPrint";
    font-size: 6pt;
    color: #00FFF2;
  }
  
  @bottom-center {
    margin: 10pt 0 30pt 0;
    content: counter(page);
    font-size: 6pt;
  }
}

@page:left {
  margin-right: 3cm; /*inner*/
  margin-left:1cm; /*outer*/

  @bottom-left {
    margin: 10pt 0 30pt 0;
    border-top: .25pt solid #00FFF2;
    content: "Testing WeasyPrint";
    font-size: 6pt;
    color: #FF05F6;
  }

  @bottom-center {
    margin: 10pt 0 30pt 0;
    content: counter(page);
    font-size: 6pt;
  }
}
 
@page:first {
  @bottom-center { content: ""; }
  @bottom-right { content: ""; }
}



body{
  font-size:8pt;
  font-family: sans;  
  padding: 0.5cm;
  }

a, a:visited, a:hover {color:#00FFF2;}

hr { color:#00FFF2;
   border:solid 1px #00FFF2;
}

div.title-beyond h1 {font-size:4em;
  margin-top:-40px;
} /*title*/

h1,h2,h3,h4,h5 {color:#FF05F6; }


figure {
  margin-left:0px;
  padding-top:0.5cm;  
}
  
img{ width: 6cm; }

figcaption { font-size:0.8em;
  width:6cm;
}

tutorials & posts on Weasy Print

http://diethardsteiner.github.io/reporting/2015/02/17/CSS-for-print.html