HTML::HTMLDoc - Perl interface to the htmldoc program for producing PDF Files from HTML content.
use HTML::HTMLDoc;
my $htmldoc = new HTML::HTMLDoc();
# generate from a string of HTML:
$htmldoc->set_html_content(qq~<html><body>A PDF file</body></html>~);
# or generate from an HTML file:
$htmldoc->set_input_file($filename);
# create the PDF
my $pdf = $htmldoc->generate_pdf();
# print the content of the PDF
print $pdf->to_string();
# save to a file
$pdf->to_file('foo.pdf');
# see the htmldoc command used to generate a PDF -- after using set_input_file()
# and all other desired configuration methods
print $htmldoc->get_htmldoc_command();This module is just a front-end to the HTMLDOC program, therefore you must have that program installed prior to attempting to install and utilize this module.
The HTMLDOC home page at https://www.msweet.org/htmldoc
This module provides an OO interface to the HTMLDOC program. HTMLDOC is a command line utility which creates PDF and PostScript files from HTML 3.2. It is actively maintained and available via the package manager (apt, yum) of the major Linux distros.
HTML 3.2 is very limited for web interfaces, but it can do a lot when preparing a document for printing. The complete list of supported HTML tags is listed here: https://www.msweet.org/htmldoc/htmldoc.html#HTMLREF There are also several HTMLDOC-specific comment options detailed here: https://www.msweet.org/htmldoc/htmldoc.html#COMMENTS
The HTMLDOC home page at https://www.msweet.org/htmldoc and includes complete documentation for the program and a link to the GitHub repo.
All the config-setting modules return true for success or false for failure. You can test if errors occurred by calling the error-method.
Please use the get_htmldoc_command() method to retrieve an HTMLDOC command with your options for easy troubleshooting. If your HTML does not work with the HTMLDOC command, it will also not work with this module.
Normally this module uses IPC::Open3 for communication with the HTMLDOC process. This works in PSGI and CGI environments, but if you are working in a Mod_Perl environment, you may need to set the file mode in new():
my $htmldoc = new HTMLDoc('mode'=>'file', 'tmpdir'=>'/tmp');Creates a new Instance of HTML::HTMLDoc.
Optional parameters are:
The tmpdir is used for temporary html-files in filemode. Remember to set the file-permissions to write for the executing process.
Sets the desired size of the pages in the resulting PDF-document. $size is one of:
Sets the owner-password for this document. $password can be any string. This only has effect if encryption is enabled. see enable_encryption().
Sets the user-password for this document. $password can be any string. If set, User will be asked for this password when opening the file. This only has effect if encryption is enabled, see enable_encryption().
Sets the permissions the user has to this document. $perm can be:
none
Setting one of this flags automatically enables the document-encryption ($htmldoc->enable_encryption()) for you, because setting permissions will have no effect without it.
Setting 'all' and 'none' will delete all other previously set options. You can set multiple options if you need, eg.:
$htmldoc->set_permissions('no-copy'); $htmldoc->set_permissions('no-modify');
This one will do the same: $htmldoc->set_permissions('no-copy', 'no-modify');
Turns link processing on.
Turns the links off.
Specifies the search path for files in a document. Use this method if your images are not shown.
Example:
$htmldoc->path("/home/foo/www/myimages/");
Sets the format of the resulting pages to landscape.
Sets the format of the resulting pages to portrait.
Turns the title on.
Turns the title off.
Set the right margin. $margin is a INT, $measure one of 'in', 'cm' or 'mm'.
Set the left margin. $margin is a INT, $measure one of 'in', 'cm' or 'mm'.
Set the bottom margin. $margin is a INT, $measure one of 'in', 'cm' or 'mm'.
Set the top margin. $margin is a INT, $measure one of 'in', 'cm' or 'mm'.
Sets the background of all pages to this background color. $color is a hex-coded color-value (eg. #FFFFFF), a rgb-value (eg set_bodycolor(0,0,0) for black) or a color name (eg. black)
Sets the default font of the content. Currently the following fonts are supported:
Arial Courier Helvetica Monospace Sans Serif Symbol Times
Sets the default font size for the body text to the number of points, e.g. 12 for 12-point font. 1 point = 1/72 of an inch.
Sets the default font of the document. Currently the following fonts are supported:
Arial Courier Helvetica Monospace Sans Serif Symbol Times
Sets the background image for the document. $image is the path to the image in your filesystem.
Sets the logo-image for the document. $image is the path to the image in your filesystem. The supported formats are BMP, GIF, JPEG, and PNG. Remember to specify the 'l'-option somewhere in header or footer using set_header() or/and set_footer().
$htmldoc->set_logoimage('mylogo.gif'); $htmldoc->set_header('.', 'l', '.');
Reads out a previous set logo-image. You will get the filename to the image.
Sets the image to use as a letter for the document. $image is the path to the image in your filesystem. The image should be 72DPI, and for portrait mode, 620-650 pixels wide and 72-90 pixels tall. The supported formats are BMP, GIF, JPEG, and PNG.
This only works when the header is set to '.L.', and this method will automatically set_header() to create that settings.
NOTE: This option is compatible with HTMLDOC 1.9.8 and higher. As of Feb. 14, 2020, that version is available from cloning (and manual compile) from the HTMLDOC Git rep: https://github.com/michaelrsweet/htmldoc
$htmldoc->set_letterhead('myletterhead.png');
Reads out a previous set letterhead image. You will get the filename to the image.
Specifies the browser width in pixels. The browser width is used to scale images and pixel measurements when generating PostScript and PDF files. It does not affect the font size of text.
The default browser width is 680 pixels which corresponds roughly to a 96 DPI display. Please note that your images and table sizes are equal to or smaller than the browser width, or your output will overlap or truncate in places.
Specifies that Flate compression should be performed on the output file. The optional level parameter is a number from 1 (fastest and least amount of compression) to 9 (slowest and most amount of compression).
This option is only available when generating Level 3 PostScript or PDF files.
$quality is a value between 1 and 100. Defaults to 75.
Sets the quality of the images in the PDF. Low values result in poor image quality but also in low file sizes for the PDF. High values result in good image quality but also in high file sizes. You can also use methods best_image_quality() or low_image_quality(). For normal usage, including photos or similar a value of 75 should be ok. For high quality results use 100. If you want to reduce file size you have to play with the value to find a compromise between quality and size that fits your needs.
Set the jpg-image quality to the maximum value. Call this method if you want to produce high quality PDF-Files. Note that this could produce huge file sizes depending on how many images you include and how big they are. See set_jpeg_compression(100).
Set the jpg-image quality to a low value (25%). Call this method if you have many or huge images like photos in your PDF and you do not want exploding file sizes for your resulting document. Note that calling this method could result in poor image quality. If you want some more control see method set_jpeg_compression() which allows you to set the value of the compression to other values than 25%.
Specifies the initial page layout in the PDF viewer. The layout parameter can be one of the following:
This option is only available when generating PDF files.
specifies the initial viewing mode of the document. $mode is one of:
Defines the charset for the output document. The following charsets are currenty supported:
cp-874 cp-1250 cp-1251 cp-1252 cp-1253 cp-1254 cp-1255 cp-1256 cp-1257 cp-1258 iso-8859-1 iso-8859-2 iso-8859-3 iso-8859-4 iso-8859-5 iso-8859-6 iso-8859-7 iso-8859-8 iso-8859-9 iso-8859-14 iso-8859-15 koi8-r utf-8
Defines that color output is desired.
Defines that b&w output is desired.
Enables output for two-sided printing.
Sets output for one-sided printing.
Snables encryption and security features for the document.
Enables encryption and security features for the document.
Sets the format of the output-document. $format can be one of:
This is the function to set the html-content as a scalar. See set_input_file($filename) to use a present file from your filesystem for input
Returns the previous set html-content.
This is the function to set the input file name. It will also switch the operational mode to 'file'.
Returns the previous set input file name.
Defines the data that should be displayed in header. One can choose from the following chars for each left, center and right:
Example:
Setting the header to contain the title left, nothing in center and actual pagenumber right do the follwing
$htmldoc->set_header('t', '.', '1');
Defines the data that should be displayed in footer. See set_header() for details setting the left, center and right value.
Specifies that fonts should be embedded in PostScript and PDF output. This is especially useful when generating documents in character sets other than ISO-8859-1.
Turn the font-embedding previously enabled by embed_fonts() off.
Generates the output-document. Returns a instance of HTML::HTMLDoc::PDF. See the perldoc of this class for details
Returns the 'htmldoc' command with arguments to generate the PDF based on the configuration you've set via the other methods. Only works if you have specified an input HTML files via set_input_file(). Very useful for troubleshooting your output very quickly.
In scalar content returns the last error that occurred, in list context returns all errors that occurred.
None by default.
Eric Chernoff - ericschernoff at gmail.com - is the primary maintainer starting from the 0.12 release.
The module was created and developed by Michael Frankl - mfrankl at seibert-media.de
MIT License
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
Many portions of this documentation pertaining to the options / configuration were copied and pasted from the HTMLDOC User Manual by Michael R Sweet at https://www.msweet.org/htmldoc/htmldoc.html.
Thanks very much to:
Rajat Bhatia
Keith W. Sheffield
Christoffer Landtman
Aleksey Serba
Helen Hamster
Najib
for suggestions and bug fixes for versions 0.10 and earlier.
Q: Where are the images that I specified in my HTML-Code?
A: The images that you want to include have to be found by the process that is generating your PDF (that is using this Module). If you call the images relatively in your html-code like: <img src="test.gif"> or <img src="./myimages/test.gif"> make sure that your perl program can find them. Note that a perl program can change the working directory internal (See perl -f chdir). You can find out the working directory using:
use Cwd; print Cwd::abs_path(Cwd::cwd);
The module provides a method path($p). Use this if you want to specify where the images you want to use can be found. Example:
$htmldoc->path("/home/foo/www/myimages/");
Q: How can I do a page break?
A: You can include a HTML-Comment that will do a page break for you at the point it is located: <!-- PAGE BREAK -->
Q: The Module works in shell but not with mod_perl
A: Use htmldoc in file-Mode:
my $htmldoc = new HTMLDoc('mode'=>'file', 'tmpdir'=>'/tmp');
Please use the GitHub Issue Tracker to report any bugs or missing functions.
https://github.com/ericschernoff/HTMLDoc/issues
If you have difficulty with any of the features of this module, please test them via the native 'htmldoc' command prior to reporting an issue.
https://www.msweet.org/htmldoc/htmldoc.html.