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18
Can I print to destination "Save as PDF" from a command line with Chrome or Chromium? I'd like to be able to automatically convert html files to PDF with Chrome's built-in functionality.
ipavlic
Posted 2013-05-08T08:50:57.777
Reputation: 1 127
11
Instead of calling up an entire web-browser, why not use the HTML rendering engine only to do the work? Use wkhtmltopdf to perform the conversion.
You can also convert an existing website to PDF
$ wkhtmltopdf http://google.com google.pdf
Note: technically Google Chrome's rendering engine is Blink, which is a fork of Webkit. There is >90% of common code between Blink and Webkit, so you should get a similar result.
hanxue
Posted 2013-05-08T08:50:57.777
Reputation: 2 354
Note from having tried this and getting subtle things missing or broken: wkhtmltopdf's source contains QtWebkit patches that enable important features such as clickable links. Your distribution's package is likely to be missing such features if it lists your distribution's usual qtwebkit package as a dependency. Installing wkhtmltopdf from source takes 3.7GiB of disk and some hours. – Anko – 2015-09-18T10:41:00.740
39-1 This answer does not correspond to the question, wkhtmltox is a great tool but it does not perform as well as chrome or firefox on exporting to PDF. – Carlos C Soto – 2016-06-16T00:25:25.560
@Anko Not sure I understood. What am I to expect by building wkhtmltopdf from source? – VH-NZZ – 2016-10-12T11:27:49.587
This isn't great for Javascript based websites. I've been trying it with https://stage-plan.com and it just doesn't work... Even raised bugs on github
– Dave – 2018-01-23T11:39:26.4873can't recommend it either, if you have sophisticated CSS wkhtmltopdf is useless. – MushyPeas – 2018-03-18T19:24:55.653
3SVGs are not rendered. – Marco Sulla – 2019-03-31T13:42:21.713
39
Chrome has started headless program.
With that, we can create a pdf. e.g. for windows navigate your commandline to
C:\Users\{{your_username}}\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome SxS\Application>
Then hit the command:
chrome --headless --print-to-pdf="d:\\{{path and file name}}.pdf" https://google.com
Vikas
Posted 2013-05-08T08:50:57.777
Reputation: 564
Just a heads up, if you have any existing instance of Chrome running on Windows the command won't work. Kill all Chrome processes first, then it will work. There might be a flag to work around this inconvenience. – John Leidegren – 2018-02-08T17:17:05.067
2@JohnLeidegren (at least) as of Chrome for Windows Version 66.0.3359.139 (Official Build) (64-bit), this works without killing any Chrome processes. – naitsirhc – 2018-05-16T18:50:57.523
2Note that you can use --user-data-dir="C:\Users\...\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data to run under your user's Chrome profile. This is useful, for example, for exporting content from a website that requires users to be logged in, since session cookies are available. – naitsirhc – 2018-05-16T18:54:08.640
@naitsirhc FYI, I've found puppeteer to be a really good alternative to the command line stuff, if you trying to do something more elaborate. It has a nice API to remote chromium to do various tasks, it also manages versions for you. Very nice. – John Leidegren – 2018-05-17T07:39:42.923
SVGs are rendered incorrectly – Marco Sulla – 2019-03-31T13:42:49.070
17
You must be using Google Chrome / Chromium 59 or later version & it’s only available for MAC OS and Linux users.
* Windows users still have to wait for some time till Version 60 *
Command :
$ google-chrome --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf=file1.pdf http://www.example.com/
$ chromium-browser --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf=file1.pdf http://www.example.com/
Reference : https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/headless-chrome
EDIT : Google Chrome / Chromium 60 has been rolled out for windows users.
Command usage in CMD :
C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application> chrome.exe --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf=file1.pdf http://www.example.com/
Your pdf file naming file1.pdf will be save in
"C:\Program Files or (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\60.0.3112.113 (chrome-version)\file1.pdf"
Rahul_Dange
Posted 2013-05-08T08:50:57.777
Reputation: 349
--disable-gpu should not be necessary anymore in most recent versions. – Ring Ø – 2017-09-11T06:47:46.320
this creates a MUCH better/consistent output than wkhtmltopdf or weasyprint – ierdna – 2017-10-12T14:53:06.300
4
https://github.com/fraserxu/electron-pdf was designed exactly for this purpose.
The CLI looks like this: $ electron-pdf http://fraserxu.me ~/Desktop/fraserxu.pdf
Nate Good
Posted 2013-05-08T08:50:57.777
Reputation: 141
I installed it, it hangs indefinitively without any output. I tried electron-pdf http://fraserxu.me test.pdf as suggested in the help, but I tried gooogle.com too – Marco Sulla – 2019-03-31T14:19:12.453
I opened issue https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/17631#issue-427405049
– Marco Sulla – 2019-03-31T14:59:56.1900
Successfully did a batch conversion of local html files to PDF -- sharing the approach.
Navigate to a folder containing a batch of html files you want to convert...
for %f in (*.html) do (
start /wait chrome --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf="C:/[DESTINATION FOLDER PATH]%f.pdf" "C:/[SOURCE HTML FILE FOLDER PATH -- ALSO CURRENT FOLDER]%f"
)
Note -- must use forward slash to avoid negating the %f in the file path.
Zac
Posted 2013-05-08T08:50:57.777
Reputation: 1
@golimar It is not a virtual printer. Chrome has a built-in option to export to pdf. – ipavlic – 2013-05-08T19:23:36.457
1I don't see any built-in Chrome switches for saving as PDF. – Karan – 2013-05-10T01:07:02.147
@Karan When you go to
– ipavlic – 2013-05-10T08:56:05.690Printthere should be aSave to PDFdestination available for you to choose. It's also clearly stated on Google's support page: http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=13795522Perhaps my previous comment wasn't clear. You wanted to know how to do this from the command line, and what I wanted to say was that Chrome/Chromium seem to have no command-line switches/params to do this, although I know you can do it from the UI. You'll need to find some way of triggering the Save As option, perhaps by sending mouse clicks or key strokes. – Karan – 2013-05-10T14:36:26.783