I recently stumbled on wkhtmltopdf and have found it to be an excellent tool for on-the-fly conversion from html to pdf in the browser.
A typical usage (in Windows) would go:
wkhtmltopdf.exe --some-option "<div>Some html <b>formatted</b> text</div>" www.host.com/page_to_print.html file.pdf
My question is: Is there an option to use <html><head></head><body><h1>This is a header</h1></body></html>
in place of www.host.com/page_to_print.html
?
Thanks for any help.
Yes and no.
There is no native support, but you can pipe content into wkhtmltopdf using the windows command prompt pipe. Try this command:
echo "<h3>magical ponies</h3>" | wkhtmltopdf.exe - test.pdf
This reads like "echo this text, output it's stdout (standard out stream) to wkhtmltopdf stdin (standard in stream)". The dash -
in the wkhtmltopdf command means that it takes it's input from stdin and not a file.
You could also echo HTML into a file, feed that file to wkhtmltopdf and delete that file inside a script.
Currently the best resources for documentation are http://wkhtmltopdf.org/usage/wkhtmltopdf.txt and http://madalgo.au.dk/~jakobt/wkhtmltoxdoc/wkhtmltopdf_0.10.0_rc2-doc.html - if you read through them, there is no mention of inputting a string of HTML like that.
Just a correction to the answer provided by Nenotlep. As Jigar noted (in a comment to Nenotlep's answer), Nenotlep's command results in quotation marks preceding and following the actual text. On my system (Windows 10) this command is the correct solution:
echo ^<h3^>magical ponies^</h3^> | "C:\Program Files\wkhtmltopdf\bin\wkhtmltopdf.exe" - test.pdf
The echo
command needs no quotation marks - but, if you do not put the text between quotation marks, the <
and >
characters need to be escaped (by ^
).
Another way to try out is writing the text into a temporary file, which - on Windows - might even be faster as some sources state:
echo ^<h3^>magical ponies^</h3^> > temp.txt
"C:\Program Files\wkhtmltopdf\bin\wkhtmltopdf.exe" - test.pdf < temp.txt
(This can also be written in one line: just put an &
between the two commands.)
Using PowerShell, you can do it like this:
$html = "<h1>Magical Ponies</h1><p>Once upon a time in Horseland, there was a band of miniat
ure creatures..."
$html | .\wkhtmltopdf.exe - C:\temp\test.pdf
Just make sure you're running the code from within the \bin\
directory of wkhtmltopdf
, otherwise, you'd have to provide a full path to the executable.
In addition to the answer provided by pp. If you prefer not to escape the <
>
characters, you can also do the following:
echo | set /p="<h3>Magical ponies</h3>" | wkhtmltopdf - test.pdf