HTML Becomes PDF - Page 3

As you've probably guessed by now, we're going to create PDF output by converting HTML into PDF. This is not a perfect solution, for several reasons:

• Unless our Perl script has already been coded to produce HTML output, this could be seen as a circuitous extra step.
• The HTMLDOC program does not always yield perfect reproductions of HTML pages, especially very complex pages. It also does not yet support style sheets.
• Integrating HTMLDOC into our Perl scripts will require making a system call, which costs us some processing time.

We proceed nonetheless, because HTMLDOC also offers several palpable advantages for generating PDF output from Perl back-end scripts:

• Most such Perl scripts are already coded to produce HTML output.
• Developers working with Perl as a back-end to web sites are likely more familiar with HTML than PDF, and so simple formatting of results is much quicker to implement with a known language (HTML) than an unknown (PDF).
• It gets the job done with the least development effort!

From the commandline, we can send a stream of HTML to HTMLDOC using a pipe, while instructing HTMLDOC to return the results to standard output. We can simply whip up a PDF file for a small web page as follows:

prompt> echo "<H2>Results</H2><TABLE><TR><TD>Score</TD><TD>95</TD></TR></TABLE>" 
| htmldoc --webpage -t pdf - > resultTable.pdf

Note that in the example above we've line-wrapped the code at the pipe symbol (|), but in reality the command is one long line. The logic: send the text contained in the echo call to the htmldoc program, which accepts the text as a web page and spits the PDF results out, which we redirect to the file resultTable.pdf. Were we to open this masterpiece in Adobe Acrobat, the results would gleam forth:

Skipping the Learning Curve - Page 2
The Perl You Need to Know
Enter the Perl - Page 4