wkhtml alternative

[MESSI]

Hello,
We have used wkhtml to generate PDF reports for several years, but we are seeking to find another replacement since wkhtml was abbandoned this year. (affordable if possible - we also have used CombinePROX for several projects from coolutils which is indeed an option but quite expensive).
I have asked the AI for alternatives, but I'd like to share with other developers some thoughts about this.
What do you use in your projects to transform html to PDFs?

[customaware]

We have used CombineProX for years. Yes, not cheap. But just always works.

[hpl123]

Ridiculous prices for the commercial ones, there has to be some other free / cheap option out there.

Why are you not continuing with wkhtml, are there parts of it that don't work for you? I use it extensively and never had any issues.

[customaware]

I need to combine HTML, PDF, Images, Excel and or Word into a single PDF Document.
That is primarily what I use it for.

Never really looked as wkhtml but looking now , it does not look like it will combine different file types into a single pdf doc.

[MESSI]

Ridiculous prices for the commercial ones, there has to be some other free / cheap option out there.

We have explored some solutions out there and seems that https://weasyprint.org/ to be closest to wkhtml, also free.

As paid solution we also recommend CombinePROx from coolutils.com

Why are you not continuing with wkhtml, are there parts of it that don't work for you? I use it extensively and never had any issues.

We had some issues recently with some of our customers:
1. Some PDF's had been seen as threats by some email servers.
2. Sometimes when server is restarted - the fonts are tiny (as workaround switch versions of wkhtml).
3. As an abandoned project is not recommended for the future projects.

[hpl123]

Ridiculous prices for the commercial ones, there has to be some other free / cheap option out there.

We have explored some solutions out there and seems that https://weasyprint.org/ to be closest to wkhtml, also free.

As paid solution we also recommend CombinePROx from coolutils.com

Why are you not continuing with wkhtml, are there parts of it that don't work for you? I use it extensively and never had any issues.

We had some issues recently with some of our customers:
1. Some PDF's had been seen as threats by some email servers.
2. Sometimes when server is restarted - the fonts are tiny (as workaround switch versions of wkhtml).
3. As an abandoned project is not recommended for the future projects.

Yeah, the abandoned project thing is not good so I agree using this solution in a production system is not the best idea. I hope you find a good other alternative and please share your results.

[kklosson]

It certainly depends on what you need to do but I use PDFTK (https://www.pdflabs.com/) to combine PDF files via CLI on the back end. It's free.