2.23.1.1. The wkhtmltopdf and wkhtmltoimage utilities

wkhtmltopdf - a set of two utilities command line for rendering HTML-files or web pages using the WebKit engine:

• The wkhtmltopdf utility renders to PDF and comes in two flavors:
  • Version 0.10:

    /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf-amd64

  • Version 0.12:

    /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf

• The wkhtmltoimage utility renders to an image file:

  /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltoimage

Utilities available on hosting default. The examples below use version 0.12 for the wkhtmltopdf utility. To use version 0.10, just replace the utility name with wkhtmltopdf on wkhtmltopdf-amd64.

View brief documentation:

• wkhtmltopdf:

  wkhtmltopdf -h

• wkhtmltoimage:

  wkhtmltoimage -h

View detailed documentation:

• wkhtmltopdf:

  wkhtmltopdf -H

• wkhtmltoimage:

  wkhtmltoimage -H

Launch format:

• wkhtmltopdf:

  wkhtmltopdf <URL or path to the source HTML file> <path and name of the output PDF file>

• wkhtmltoimage:

  wkhtmltoimage <URL or path to HTML source file> <path and name of output image file>

A simple example of converting a web page:

• To PDF document:

  wkhtmltopdf http://google.com google.pdf

  Или:

  /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf http://google.com google.pdf

• To the image file:

  wkhtmltoimage http://google.com google.png

  Или:

  /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltoimage http://google.com google.png

Simple conversion example HTML-document:

• To PDF document:

  wkhtmltopdf /home/example/way/to/file/document.html document.pdf

  Или:

  /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf /home/example/way/to/file/document.html document.pdf

  Where example this hosting account name.

• To the image file:

  wkhtmltoimage /home/example/way/to/file/document.html document.png

  Или:

  /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltoimage /home/example/way/to/file/document.html document.png

  Where example this hosting account name.

When generating a PDF document, you can add a header and footer from separate HTML-files:

wkhtmltopdf --header-html <path to HTML header> --footer-html <path to HTML footer> <path to source HTML file> <path and name of output PDF file>

If necessary, you can set indents for PDF documents:

wkhtmltopdf --margin-top 25mm --margin-bottom 25 mm --margin-left 15mm --margin-right 15mm --header-html <path to HTML header> --footer-html <path to HTML footer> <path to HTML source file> <path and name of output PDF file>

Examples of other useful options for wkhtmltopdf:

• –encoding windows-1251 - explicit indication of the source encoding HTML-file.
• –page-size A4 - the page format of the output PDF file.
• –orientation Landscape - page orientation of the output PDF file.

You can use utilities from PHP using the function exec.