Research/Web-to-print/WeasyPrint

Print in hybrid publishing workflows

Print products = bottleneck in hybrid publishing workflows

Screens in pages represent different paradigms

• Instead of reflowable text, continuous space, variable screen size
• Page: a fixed space

The translation of layouts for screen to page layouts, within is not trivial.

HTML-to-print Tools

LaTex

A type-setting/document preparation language, focused on producing typographicaly correct PDFs.

positive aspects

• LaTex is a markup language;
• Pandoc converts seamlessly to LaTex.
• Supports page numbers, hyphenation, bibliography, references, hyperlinks, etc, etc...
• Can produce more experimental and generative outputs.

is a visual rendering engine for HTML and CSS that can export to PDF. 

Its CSS layout engine is written in Python, but employs several libraries.

positive aspects

• Uses HTML and CSS to layout the PDF
• Supports features like page size, page numbering, hyphenation in several languages <ref name="hyp">With the pyphen library)</re>
• Resulting PDFs can achieve high level of complexity, with simple instructions
• Simple and easy to use
• Can be used as a Python library or as a standalone program
• Free software (BSD license)

negative aspects

• Can be difficult to install, due to its dependencies
• It does not support CSS custom fonts
• No support for folded formats, such as booklets: no mechanism for imposition

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What is Weasy Print

Weasy Print (WP) is