Linux web to pdf

How to convert a HTML file to PDF (with colors)

How can I «export» this local file on my Ubuntu 12.04 to a PDF? (the look and color should stay the same). I tried ex.: Ctrl + P -> print to PDF, but it didn’t preserve the colours. I tried htmldoc with the —color option.. but it’s the same problem.. It would be great to do this via the command line.

@Harley That option is not available on all browsers and all platforms. I’m an Ubuntu 18 and that option doesn’t show up in Chrome or Firefox.

7 Answers 7

Open your html file in LibreOffice Writer and then, under File in the menu, choose export to PDF . That’s it.

The software can be installed using sudo apt-get install wkhtmltopdf .

Webkit HTML to PDF: wkhtmltopdf:

sudo apt-get install wkhtmltopdf 

Here a nixCraft tutorial (updated on 2017).

The latest version is headless (does not require X server).

Another possibility: phantomjs is a magic headless web browser, also based on webkit html. It can export a page as PDF among other things.

WeasyPrint seems promising. I tried wkhtmltopdf and although it renders things in an acceptable way, it doesn’t render everything properly and it creates pdfs that take many seconds to open!

weasyprint mypage.html out.pdf 

As an extra it might be helpful to alter the CSS if you want to get the browser view and PDF to look identical.

/* For converting to PDF */ body < width: 210mm; /* A4 dimension */ >@page

I have just tried to install weasypeasey but didn’t work.. Maybe you could help? 🙂 First I did this: apt-get install python-dev python-pip python-lxml libcairo2 libpango1.0-0 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 libffi-dev shared-mime-info and then installing pip with pip install weasypeasy but gets this error: Could not find any downloads that satisfy the requirement weasypeasy

weasyprint is good but about 15 times slower than wkhtmltopdf as I recall, so it was not suitable for us to generate reports on demand for our clients. wkhtmltopdf can be persuaded to do a good job even for complex reports. with some considerable effort!

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How to Convert a Webpage to PDF in Linux

Saving a webpage as a PDF comes in handy when you archive certain resources or use them for educational purposes.

But, how do you convert a webpage to PDF in Linux?

You can either choose to go the easy way out using the web browser (GUI) on every Linux distribution or use the terminal to turn a webpage into a PDF file.

Here, I shall mention both the methods to help you get the job done.

Method 1: Converting a Webpage to PDF Using Web Browser

Even though I use Mozilla Firefox for this tutorial, you can do the same thing with any of the best browsers available for Linux.

1. Load up the webpage you want to convert.

2. Head to the browser menu to find the “Print” option or use the keyboard shortcut “Ctrl + P.”

3. By default, it should let you save it as a PDF. You need to hit “Save,” and choose the destination and save the webpage.

The one major problem with this simple approach is that it includes all the elements on the page. This may include comments, footer etc. You may use a PDF editor to remove parts of it but that’s an additional task.

A better option is to utilize a browser extension like Print Friendly. It allows you to edit and remove parts of the webpage before downloading the PDF.

Method 2: Converting a Webpage to PDF or Images Using the Terminal

You probably already know that you can browse internet in Linux terminal and even download files using the command line. That’s not surprising considering you can do a lot more in the terminal, including downloading a webpage as PDF.

A nifty open-source command-line tools wkhtmltopdf and wkhtmltoimage come to the rescue that lets you convert any HTML webpage to a PDF or image file.

It utilizes the Qt WebKit rendering engine to get the task done. You can explore its GitHub page for more information.

You should be able to install it from the default repository of your Linux distribution. For Ubuntu-based distros, you can type in the command:

sudo apt install wkhtmltopdf

It is pretty straightforward to use no matter whether you want to convert it to a PDF or image file:

To convert a webpage into a PDF, type in:

wkhtmltopdf URL/domain filename.pdf

As an example, here’s how it would look:

wkhtmltopdf linuxmint.com mint.pdf

You can choose to use the complete URL as “https://linuxmint.com” or use the domain name as shown in the example above.

The file generated will be saved in the home directory by default.

You also get a few exciting options when converting a webpage.

For instance, you can apply a grayscale filter to the PDF file, make multiple copies of the page in the same file, and exclude images during conversion.

The grayscale filter may not work on every webpage, but you can try that using the command:

wkhtmltopdf -g google.com googlepage.pdf

To make multiple copies of pages in the same PDF file, the command would be:

wkhtmltopdf --copies 2 linuxmint.com mint.pdf

And, if you want to exclude images from the web pages, just type:

wkhtmltopdf --no-images linuxmint.com mint.pdf

Additionally, if you want to convert a webpage as an image, the command would look like this:

wkhtmltoimage linuxmint.com mint.png

Note that unlike the GUI method using a browser, using these tools via the terminal has its limitation. It does not seem to convert web pages utilizing any code snippets successfully.

Sites like ours and even DuckDuckGo didn’t convert to PDF or an image. However, simple HTML sites like Linuxmint.com, Ubuntu.com, Google.com, worked like charm.

Wrapping Up

To get the best results, saving a webpage as a PDF using a browser seems to be the way to go. But, if you want more options and go through the terminal, the wkhtmltopdf utility should come in handy.

How do you prefer to convert web pages to PDF in Linux? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

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All downloads are currently hosted via GitHub releases, so you can browse for a specific download or use the links below.

Do not use wkhtmltopdf with any untrusted HTML – be sure to sanitize any user-supplied HTML/JS, otherwise it can lead to complete takeover of the server it is running on! Please read the project status for the gory details.

Stable

The current stable series is 0.12.6, which was released on June 11, 2020 – see changes since 0.12.5.

OS/Distribution	Supported on	Architectures
Windows	Installer (Vista or later)	64-bit	32-bit
	7z Archive (XP/2003 or later)	64-bit	32-bit
macOS	Installer (10.7 or later)	64-bit
Debian	11 ( bullseye )	amd64	i386	arm64	ppc64el	raspberrypi
	10 ( buster )	amd64	i386	arm64	ppc64el	raspberrypi
	9 ( stretch )	amd64	i386	arm64	raspberrypi
Ubuntu	22.04 ( jammy )	amd64	arm64	ppc64el
	20.04 ( focal )	amd64	arm64	ppc64el
	18.04 ( bionic )	amd64	i386	arm64	ppc64el
	16.04 ( xenial )	amd64	i386	arm64
AlmaLinux	9	x86_64	aarch64
	8	x86_64	aarch64	ppc64le
CentOS	7	x86_64	i686	aarch64	ppc64le
	6	x86_64	i686
Amazon Linux	2 (package)	x86_64	aarch64
	2 (lambda zip)	x86_64
openSUSE Leap	15	x86_64	aarch64	ppc64le
Arch Linux	20200705	x86_64

All of the above packages were produced automatically and were built on the latest OS/distribution patch release at the time of the release.

Archive

Please note that bug reports will not be accepted against the following, which are considered obsolete. It is recommended to use the latest stable release instead, and report an issue if there is a regression from a previous release.

Date	Release
2018-06-11	0.12.5
2019-04-30	0.12.1.4 (linux-only)
2016-11-22	0.12.4
2016-03-02	0.12.3.2 (windows-only)
2016-01-30	0.12.3.1 (windows-only)
2016-01-20	0.12.3
2015-07-12	0.12.2.4 (windows-only)
2015-06-20	0.12.2.3 (windows-only)
2015-04-06	0.12.2.2 (windows-only)
2015-01-19	0.12.2.1
2015-01-09	0.12.2
2014-06-26	0.12.1
2014-02-06	0.12.0

If you need versions older than 0.12.0 , you can look at the obsolete downloads.

FAQ

Why do you have static builds with patched Qt?

Good question. Some features require you to use a patched Qt, because those aren’t yet upstream – please read the project status for a longer explanation.

Most Linux distributions (quite understandably) would prefer that this project upstreamed the patches, and choose to compile without those features. This leads to quite different behavior – you get a later web engine, but behavior can vary from distribution to distribution.

Why are there no “generic” Linux builds (which were provided earlier)?

Although the builds are static, it is very important to understand what it means in the context of Qt – on which wkhtmltopdf is built. A static build means that only Qt is linked in this manner – the remaining system packages still need to be installed. Over a period of time, major areas of divergence between distributions were found by trial and error:

• different library versions: not every distribution provides the same versions. This was especially the case for libpng and libjpeg , with a lot of distributions choosing between the 1.2, 1.5 and 1.6 series for the former and multiple versions of libjpeg and/or its fork libjpeg-turbo . While this could be addressed easily by linking them statically (and was actually done so for previous releases) – it broke down when it came to the next point.
• different OpenSSL versions: due to OpenSSL having a bad track record then (it’s better now), distributions started aggressively upgrading their OpenSSL version and disabling unused parts of the library. This led to a situation where there was effectively zero backward compatibility and things started breaking randomly – see #3001 for a very long read of the problems faced. This was the direct motivation to create a separate packaging repository.
• incompatible libc: not every distribution has the same glibc version. If you compile with a later version, it won’t work on a distribution which uses an older version. This was worked around earlier by using CentOS 6 (which had an old enough glibc version). But due to the rise of Docker, the alpine image became very popular. This doesn’t use glibc at all, but the musl libc. So the generic binaries never really worked on Alpine.

While Python has also tried to do this using manylinux – it doesn’t always work well (e.g. alpine is not recommended with binary wheels if you google for it), and requires you to statically link everything. This may work for them, but wkhtmltopdf also depends on the runtime configuration on actual fonts installed (i.e. fontconfig and freetype2 ). It’s not possible to abstract everything out and test/fix everything for every OS/distribution with the limited resources this project has – it makes more sense to make distribution-specific versions which are almost guaranteed to work, as they use the specific versions that the distribution has packaged.

I don’t see an appropriate download for my platform!

If the distribution you are using is listed:

• but not the specific patch release – try it, as it’s very likely to work regardless.
• the major release isn’t listed – we only support LTS versions, so try a LTS version older than your release.
• cannot install package – you can always extract it (google for extract from ), but you’ll need to have the dependencies installed.

Head over to the packaging repository and start a discussion if your platform isn’t listed.

How do I use it with FaaS setups?

You’ll need to extract the distribution-specific package, bundle it with necessary libraries, configuration and/or fonts and then upload it. See this StackOverflow question for Google Cloud Functions. PRs are welcome to expand this section, if you have more information about this – this is not a setup that the maintainer uses 😄

How do I use it in AWS Lambda?

All files required for lambda layer are packed in one zip archive (Amazon Linux 2 / lambda zip). You may test it locally by unpacking the archive into the layer directory and running next commands:

$ docker run --rm -it -v$PWD/layer:/opt amazonlinux:2 bash-4.2# LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/lib FONTCONFIG_PATH=/opt/fonts /opt/bin/wkhtmltopdf https://google.com/ /opt/google.pdf 

After that, you may find a pdf file generated from the google home page in your layer directory.

To use wkhtmltox in your lambda function you may put the content of the archive together with your lambda function or create a layer. Don’t forget to provide an environment variable for fontconfig ( FONTCONFIG_PATH=/opt/fonts ).

In case you use Serverless framework you may add the next lines to your serverless.yml file:

layers: wkhtmltoxLayer: name: wkhtmltox description: wkhtmltox binaries for pdf/image generation package: artifact: wkhtmltox-x.xx.xxx.amazonlinux2_lambda.zip functions: PdfGenerator: handler: generatePdf.handler layers: -  Ref: WkhtmltoxLayerLambdaLayer > environment: FONTCONFIG_PATH: /opt/fonts 

Symantec reports a virus WS.Reputation.1 for the Windows builds

This is a false positive reported because Symantec has not seen this file before – see this clarification for details.

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