This is one of those things that is surprisingly hard and a reason to seriously thank package maintainers. There are several issues: Qt and Webkit have a lot of dependencies, Qt switched to Chromium for their web engine a while back so there’s more effort to get their Webkit integration, and the main one is that wkhtmltopdf hasn’t already been ported to Buildroot. If the last one weren’t the case, then this would be soooo much easier.
Here’s what I’d try:
- See if someone has built a static linked binary of wkhtmltopdf for ARM. If yes, then try including that in a priv directory or a rootfs_overlay. If you can run it and it doesn’t crash immediately, you’re probably good.
- See if you can upload the data to a server for pdf conversion.
- Port wkhtmltopdf to plain-vanilla Buildroot (no Nerves). Try setting the “all static libraries” option and see if you can generate a static wkhtmltopdf binary. I.e. make option #1.
- If there are issues making a static version of wkhtmltopdf, then try making one that uses dynamic libraries in plain-vanilla Buildroot. I’m certain this will work. Once you do this, the path to integrating it with Nerves will make a lot more sense.
I’m not going to lie, there’s some work here if #1 or #2 don’t pan out. I recently had to deal with this and ended up using a Qt PDF report generator (NCReport). That solution has some different challenges, but is much faster than wkhtmltopdf if you are running on a slow processor.
Good luck, and please let us know how you end up.
