Thank you Patrick. This is exact solution I've came up with right after I've sent letter to Cafe. For some reason I didn't received copy of my own message and wasn't able to respond until someone respond first. Many thanks. Indeed in most cases if you can ask a question you can find a solution. вт, 9 июн. 2020 г. в 13:29, Patrick Chilton :

Could you call wkhtmltopdf directly with System.Process? Pandoc doesn't seem to add much value here.

On Tue, Jun 9, 2020, 09:15 Geraldus wrote:

...

Hi dear Cafe!

I'm trying to achieve trivial task to generate PDF from HTML template using Pandoc.

So far I've tried `wkhtmltopdf` and `pdflatex` creators, both with no luck.

I want to put few words about `pdflatex` and `xelatex` creators first, for someone who will struggle with same task in future, it's quite hard to find code examples on the web.

Initially I wasn't able to render document with `pdflatex` creator. I would like to mention that `pdflatex` required a lot of LaTeX stuff to be installed, especially font packages. Also I've spent several hours to make rendering happen because I haven't specified template in `WriterOptions`. `pdflatex` do not capable to handle Cyrillic Unicode characters, and finally I figured out I have to use `xelatex` creator. Also I've found and used default template:

...

pandoc <- readHtml def (toStrict $ renderHtml html) tpl' <- getDefaultTemplate "latex" makePDF "xelatex" [] writeLaTeX (def {writerTemplate = Just tpl'}) pandoc

But in this case I got white space instead of Cyrillic chars in resulting PDF and a bunch of warnings about missing chars in default font in console. I assume the font itself is specified in template. I've looked into default template and it's huge. I guess I can prepare more simple template for my own needs but it will take a lot of time to get familiar with LaTeX document syntax.

I've tried `wkhtmltopdf`, which seems to be lightweight and easy solution. It seemed to work well except encoding issues: resulting PDF contains Cyrillic which rendered incorrectly. I've tried to pass `["encoding utf-8"]` as arguments in `makePDF` call, but this results in runtime error:

...

--margin-bottom specified in incorrect location

Googling around this issue led me to glue that when I pass encoding argument to `wkhtmltopdf` it breaks expected arguments order in command which Pandoc generates. This is likely could be easily fixed, but Pandoc have a lot of opened issues on Github and also it requires some digging into `wkhtmltopdf` command line arguments syntax. I've looked into Pandoc sources and it seems possible to provide simple patch, but I need a guidance. According to `wkhtmltopdf` it distinguish global args, page args, cover args, table of contents args. `encoding` argument is page level argument, but Pandoc put extra args specified in `makePDF` after default page arguments (`pdfargs` in following code sample):

...

let args = mathArgs ++ concatMap toArgs [("page-size", getField "papersize" meta') ,("title", getField "title" meta') ,("margin-bottom", Just $ fromMaybe "1.2in" (getField "margin-bottom" meta')) ,("margin-top", Just $ fromMaybe "1.25in" (getField "margin-top" meta')) ,("margin-right", Just $ fromMaybe "1.25in" (getField "margin-right" meta')) ,("margin-left", Just $ fromMaybe "1.25in" (getField "margin-left" meta')) ,("footer-html", getField "footer-html" meta') ,("header-html", getField "header-html" meta') ] ++ pdfargs

Likely this breaks everything. The quickest and dirtiest workaround I see is to check each argument, and if it is a page level argument put it for each page object. Another solution may be to specify encoding for Pandoc document some other way, but I can't guess how to do that yet.

Maybe someone have already faced similar task and knows easier way to render HTML to PDF with Haskell. I will very grateful for any help, advice or other glues how to achieve my goal.

Arthur. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list To (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to: http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe Only members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post.

With Pandoc, you might try using the Context engine to generate the PDF instead of the default pdflatex. I have no idea about Cyrillic characters or processing HTML directly, but the Context engine seemed to work better when I wanted to process Markdown and generate tagged PDFs for accessibility. Conrad H. Conrad Cunningham, D.Sc. Professor Emeritus Computer & Information Science University of Mississippi, USA On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 3:51 AM Albert Krewinkel wrote:

Hi Arthur,

Geraldus writes:

...

I'm trying to achieve trivial task to generate PDF from HTML template using Pandoc.

So far I've tried `wkhtmltopdf` and `pdflatex` creators, both with no luck.

I second Patrick's suggestion to use wkhtmltopdf directly.

You may also want to post this question to the [pandoc-discuss] mailing list, as this appears to be more of a pandoc than a Haskell question.

Cheers, Albert