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by cosmiciron 102 days ago
Thanks for the correction. I'm actually not familiar with Prince, so I really can't tell.

To be clear, VMPrint isn't meant to compete with established engines like that. It’s just a genuinely helpful tool I built from scratch for the specific tasks I needed to accomplish because I couldn't find an alternative.

Prince looks powerful, but I have a feeling it probably wouldn't have been the right fit for my use case anyway.
1 comments
irrationalfab 102 days ago
Prince starts at 2k. This is OSS
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Semaphor 102 days ago
Weasyprint [0] is OSS and supports CSS Paged media. I’m not actually sure why you’d ever use something like this project (or headless chrome for that matter, maybe you need some automated login as well?) which doesn’t.

print-css.rock [1] has a good overview of available tools and their features.

[0]: https://github.com/Kozea/WeasyPrint

[1]: https://print-css.rocks/

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cosmiciron 102 days ago
Because CSS is exactly what I wanted to avoid. I just needed predictable pager layout, and I didn't want to wrestle with CSS. Besides, this thing's tiny size allows it to run in a serverless function on the Edge, and that can be useful sometimes.
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Semaphor 102 days ago
Why use HTML if you want to avoid CSS? HTML default styles only?
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cosmiciron 102 days ago
Who said I used HTML? It was impossible to write screenplay/manuscript in HTML and receive industry compliant outputs when printed/converted to PDF.
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TimTheTinker 99 days ago
Sounds like you need Scrivener. It outputs industry standard formats for all kinds of manuscripts.
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fmajid 102 days ago
And Weasyprint does not have browser dependencies either, which is great.

Fun fact: I had to write a routine administrative letter for my parents in another country, I asked Claude to do so in PDF form so I could email it to them they would print it and mail it. The way it did so was to write a Python program using Weasyprint to generate the PDF...

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TimTheTinker 101 days ago
For a personal desktop license, it's $495.

If you need something specific for a hosted service and aren't able to pay the full license fee, I can attest from personal experience that Håkon Wium Lie is very friendly and can probably work something out with you.

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Koshkin 101 days ago
What does price have to do with anything.
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