Although it is possible to just print the invoice from the browser, many
people will not even try an assume that they can not create a PDF for
the invoice.
I thought of using Groff or TeX to create the PDF, but it would mean
maintaining two templates in two different systems (HTML and whatever i
would use), and would probably look very different, because i do not
know Groff or TeX that well.
I wish there was a way to tell the browser to print to PDF, and it can
be done, but only with the Chrome Protocol to a server-side running
Chrome instance. This works, but i would need a Chrome running as a
daemon.
I also wrote a Qt application that uses QWebEngine to print the PDF,
much like wkhtmltopdf, but with support for more recent HTML and CSS
standards. Unfortunately, Qt 6.4’s embedded Chromium does not follow
break-page-inside as well as WeasyPrint does.
To use WeasyPrint, at first i wanted to reach the same URL as the user,
passing the cookie to WeasyPrint so that i can access the same invoice
as the user, something that can be done with wkhtmltopdf, but WeasyPrint
does not have such option. I did it with a custom Python script, but
then i need to package and install that script, that is not that much
work, but using the Debian-provided script is even less work, and less
likely to drift when WeasyPrint changes API.
Also, it is unnecessary to do a network round-trip from Go to Python
back to Go, because i can already write the invoice HTML as is to
WeasyPrint’s stdin.
jordi fita mas
4d2379555e