Wkhtmltopdf version, first page and TOC

4
votes

Some questions for this very nifty tool, unfortunately lacking many usage examples.

  1. Manual speaks of a possible “Reduced Functionality” for wkhtmltopdf. I have version wkhtmltox-0.11.0_rc1-installer.exe, by running wkhtmltopdf --version what should I read to understand whether my version is the reduced one or not?
  2. Currently I like wkhtmltopdf for webpages I want to read later and/or store. To mirror webpages I use httrack, then I generate the PDF with wkhtmltopdf *.html offline.pdf. How can I set/specify the first PDF page from the *.html list? Currently they seem to be converted in alphabetical order.
  3. If I run wkhtmltopdf toc http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/qstring.html qstring.pdf I simply get a leading blank page, no TOC. What’s wrong?

Thanks for helping

EDIT:

@Nenotlep:

Your TOC trick works perfectly.

As for the first page, I don’t need an actual cover. What I need is a way to download/convert a given page www.site.com/foo.html and all the linked pages (A.html, B.html ...) up to a certain depth level. Then I want a single PDF starting with foo.html and containing also the pages A.html, B.html ... (with relative links).

I don’t think there is an option to download and insert the linked pages in the final PDF (please, correct me if I am wrong). So I use httrack.com to download and wkhtmltopdf to convert. Given the alphabetical behaviour of wkhtmltopdf, the best now seems to rename the target page, downloaded with httrack, something like !foo.html. Please, let me know of possible alternatives.

2
pdf-generationwkhtmltopdfhtml-to-pdf
Your idea is very interesting but sadly I don't really have any other suggestion other than what you already have. If I think of something I'll add here later! – Joel Peltonen

2 Answers

4
votes

For part 3 of the question which is blank TOC, the latest stable version 0.12.5 also does not generate it. The pre-release version 0.12.6-dev has fixed this problem in Mac.

2
votes

  1. I think all available precompiled wkhtmltopdf's are compiled with the patched QT, they are not reduced. The reduced functionality means that it was compiled without a special patched version of QT. I use the windows version and it isn't reduced.

  2. I think the cover command line argument would work for you. I can't test at the moment, but try a command like wkhtmltopdf cover derpy.html toc --xsl-style-sheet default.xsl rarity.html twilight.html spike.html equestriadaily.pdf

    At least in Linux, I think the asterix *.html simply explodes into all the html files before the command is performed, so if you select one html file for the cover and then do *.html in the same folder you will get the file twice. Getting around this issue might need some command line sorcery or a batch file or some other trickery.

  3. This is a bug in wkhtmltopdf. The workaround is to manually set a tocfile. You can get the default tocfile with wkhtmltopdf.exe --dump-default-toc-xsl. Then you can save the output as a file and use it like wkhtmltopdf.exe toc --xsl-style-sheet default.xsl www.stackoverflow.com so.pdf.