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by bshimmin 3216 days ago
We had an absolutely ghastly time last year trying to implement wkhtmltopdf in a Rails app - we probably wasted an entire week fighting with both Wicked PDF and PDFKit before we just gave up and wrote something using Prawn instead (which was, of course, extremely time-consuming in a different way, but at least the end result was good).
1 comments

What problems did you run into with wkhtmltopdf? We have been using it without much trouble. Chrome pdf generation is nice but wkhtmltopdf generates smaller PDFs with table of contents.
All kinds of problems that others have mentioned above, plus in terms of the Rails integration, it felt like we hit almost every one of the open issues on the GitHub repos for both Wicked PDF and PDFKit. I vaguely recall fonts in production being a problem, a general lack of reliability, performance issues, fiddling around with various different binaries of wkhtmltopdf to find one that maybe worked... probably other things besides. It was a bad week and I wish I hadn't reminded myself!

(With no disrespect, of course, to the authors of these libraries - they just didn't work well for us.)