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Configuring wkhtmltopdf on Linux

Introduction

These are just some quick notes on setting up wkhtmltopdf on our Amazon Linux 2023 and CentOS Linux servers.

Details

• Download wkhtmltopdf-0.12.6. We found that Amazon Linux 2023 works best with the Almalinux 9 build.
• Install the software tar xvf wkhtmltox-0.12.4_linux-generic-amd64.tar.xz (and put in ~/bin or /usr/local/bin or link to them)
• Extract the wkhtmltox-0.12.6.1-2.almalinux9.x86_64.rpm for Almalinux 9 in the a new folder on your Amazon Linux 2023 instance

    mkdir ~/wk0.12.6.1-2.almalinux9    (put the downloaded RPM file here)
    rpm2cpio wkhtmltox-0.12.6.1-2.almalinux9.x86_64.rpm | cpio -idmv
    ln -s ~/wk0.12.6.1-2.almalinux9/usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf ~/bin/wkhtmltopdf

• Install dependencies via yum: yum install fontconfig libXrender libXext xorg-x11-fonts-Type1 xorg-x11-fonts-75dpi freetype libpng zlib libjpeg-turbo openssl

• If it's not in the PATH for the user account that runs Tomcat/Java, make sure it is added. For 'tar' extracts, you'll want to move them, link to them, or otherwise ensure the wkhtmltopdf executable is in your PATH. For Windows, it must also be in the command path for 'wkhtmltopdf.exe'. We have also shown this working on OS X by dragging to the Applications area and it seems to install in /usr/local/bin.

• For our HTML, we typically use options: wkhtmltopdf --javascript-delay 5000 --page-size Letter --encoding utf-8 --print-media-type --disable-smart-shrinking --image-quality 100 --margin-left 5mm --margin-right 5mm --margin-top 5mm --margin-bottom 5mm

  Try running the command wkhtmltopdf --version to ensure it can be found in your PATH and that it shows no missing components.

• For the 32-bit static builds, assuming you are on 64-bit Linux, you'll want to make sure you have these components with i386/i686 architecture. If you have the 64-bit versions, you can use yum whatprovides fontconfig to discover the component details for the 32-bit version (in this case, fontconfig-2.4.1-7.el5.i386 or fontconfig-2.8.0-3.el6.i686). This includes fontconfig, libXrender, openssl, libzip, libXext and libstdc++.

  (i.e. yum install fontconfig.i686 libXrender.i686 openssl.i686 libzip.i686 libXext.i686 libstdc++.i686)

• If your fonts have kerning issues, as described at https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf/issues/45 (see entry dandersson commented on Feb 8), you may want to add this file /etc/fonts/conf.avail/10-wkhtmltopdf.conf and then add a softlink ln -s /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/10-wkhtmltopdf.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-wkhtmltopdf.conf to activate it for fontconfig. You can use fc-cache -fv to force the fontconfig cache to be rebuilt.

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM 'fonts.dtd'>
<fontconfig>
 <match target="font">
  <edit mode="assign" name="rgba">
   <const>rgb</const>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font">
  <edit mode="assign" name="hinting">
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font">
  <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle">
   <const>hintslight</const>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font">
  <edit mode="assign" name="antialias">
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font">
  <edit mode="assign" name="lcdfilter">
   <const>lcddefault</const>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font">
  <edit mode="assign" name="embeddedbitmap">
   <bool>false</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
</fontconfig>

Windows Developers

There is generally a Windows installer version for this program that can be used on Windows platforms. Our developers typically are on Windows, and so they make use of the Windows version if they need the PDF export capability.

We downloaded wkhtmltopdf-0.12.4 and when run, it installed the tool in C:\Program Files (x86)\wkhtmltopdf for 32-bit and C:\Program Files\wkhtmltopdf for 64-bit.

For Tomcat+Java on Windows 7, we found we had to add that path to Windows PATH. For Windows 7, we did this by clicking on the Windows icon, Right-click on Computer->Properties, click on Advanced system settings, click on Environment Variables button, under System variables scroll and click on Path, click the Edit button, then append at the end: ;C:\Program Files (x86)\wkhtmltopdf\bin