cef-pdf

cef-pdf is a command line utility (with embedded HTTP server as an optional mode) for creating PDF documents from HTML content. It uses Google Chrome browser's Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) library for all it's internal work; loading urls, rendering HTML & CSS pages and PDF printing, therefore, it produces perfect, accurate, excellent quality PDF documents.

Usage:

cef-pdf [options] --url=<url>|--file=<path> [output]

Options:
  --help -h        This help screen.
  --url=<url>      URL to load, may be http, file, data, anything supported by Chromium.
  --file=<path>    File path to load using file:// scheme. May be relative to current directory.
  --stdin          Read content from standard input until EOF (Unix: Ctrl+D, Windows: Ctrl+Z).
  --size=<spec>    Size (format) of the paper: A3, B2.. or custom <width>x<height> in mm.
                   A4 is the default.
  --list-sizes     Show all defined page sizes.
  --landscape      Wheather to print with a landscape page orientation.
                   Default is portrait.
  --margin=<spec>  Paper margins in mm (much like CSS margin but without units)
                   If omitted some default margin is applied.
  --javascript     Enable JavaScript.
  --backgrounds    Print with backgrounds. Default is without.

Server options:
  --server         Start HTTP server
  --host=<host>    If starting server, specify ip address to bind to.
                   Default is 127.0.0.1
  --port=<port>    Specify server port number. Default is 9288

Output:
  PDF file name to create. Default is to write binary data to standard output.

HTTP server usage

Execute cef-pdf with --server option and visit localhost:9288 with web browser. Default json response, with status and version number, should indicate the server is up and running on local machine:

{
    "status": "ok",
    "version": "0.2.0"
}

To receive a PDF, just make POST request to localhost:9288/foo.pdfwith some HTML content as the request body. foo may be any name you choose, .pdf suffix is always required. The response will contain the PDF data, with application/pdf as the content type.

In addition to POSTing content inside the request body, special HTTP header Content-Location is supported, which should be an URL to some external content. cef-pdf will try to grab the content from this URL and use it just like it was the request's body.

Building

cef-pdf should compile without problems with cmake/ninja on Windows (7, x64), Linux (tested on Debian 8.5.0, x64) and Mac OS X (10.11.6) using decent C++11 compiler. In order to build, CEF build distribution files must be downloaded and placed in some directory, like /path/to/cef/release in the example below.

$ mkdir ~/build
$ cd ~/build
$ cmake -G "Ninja" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCEF_ROOT=/path/to/cef/release /path/to/cef-pdf
$ ninja

How to build CefGlue myself?

• Download CEF binaries from http://opensource.spotify.com/cefbuilds/index.html and unpack the archive
• Copy include folder from CEF into CefGlue.Interop.Gen\include. Manually remove cef_thread.h and cef_waitable_event.h - these two files should be excluded.
• Run gen-cef3.cmd within CefGlue.Interop.Gen folder. Note that you need Python 2.7 installed. In case you need to adjust path to Python binaries you can do it in gen-cef3.cmd file. This step will generate multiple C# files in CefGlue project.
• Build CefGlue binaries - e.g. by running build-net40.cmd in the root of the project
• If you just upgraded to a new version of CEF may see compilation errors - most typical fix is to add new generated files into CefGlue VS project

License

cef-pdf is licensed under the MIT license.