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everybodyknowslast Tuesday at 5:29 PM1 replyview on HN

> writing a simple PDF / scholarly article from code is pretty easy with current tools

I tripped over a lot of abandonware while looking for a free OSS HTML->PDF solution, recently. What do you recommend?


Replies

toughlast Tuesday at 6:14 PM

I settled using latex with tectonic, you could always leverage playwright or similar for easy html -> print to pdf without any weird libs? (not great startup time, but you can batch many ops in one session)

# justfile ── put in repo root set shell := ["bash", "-cu"] # one shell → predictable env, pipe-fail, etc.

# Build a PDF once pdf: tectonic -X compile src-v0.1/main.tex --outdir target/pdf # or swap for typst

# Clean artefacts clean: rm -rf target

# Live-reload while writing watch: cargo watch -q -x 'just pdf'

then i just split the paper in sections like react components but using tex

main.tex

\documentclass{article}

\input{preamble}

\begin{document} \maketitle

\input{sections/abstract}

\input{sections/introduction}

\input{sections/syntax}

\input{sections/evaluation}

\input{sections/conclusion}

\end{document}