Hey @maltoe,
Thanks for writing this library, it’s very convenient and simple to install/use! I’ve been playing with it a little bit and tried to print a pdf from a url and it works great!
I’d like to print a pdf from a url which requires that the user is authenticated. One way to do this would be through the cookies in the session. Do you know if I can send cookies to Chrome with ChromicPDF?
I think it should be possible through the Chrome DevTools Protocol.
Hey @ryanzidago,
thanks! Glad you like it 
Setting a cookie is certain possibly with the devtools protocol, and could be implemented into ChromicPDF relatively easily somewhere here.
That being said, I’m trying to discourage users from printing PDFs from remote URLs (hence the default offline mode), for 2 reasons: First, printing from remote URLs seemed to be a bit unreliable in my tests, at least I got rather fluctuating response times (i.e. printing http://example.net a thousand times, sometimes for some reason Chrome would take a second or so to load the page), and second I think users should be well aware of the security implications when doing so.
However, as said, it’s definitely possible. Could you open an issue in the repo so we can discuss there?
Alright, new issue here: There should be a possibility to send cookies to Chrome. · Issue #23 · bitcrowd/chromic_pdf · GitHub
Was just wondering, since we need to build it at work soon, is it possible to output pdfs with forms? So something that can be filled out inside the pdf later.
@egze I don’t think that Chrome is capable of saving editable forms in PDF, or at least it won’t do so when printing a HTML form… sorry. Not even sure if there is any HTML-to-PDF renderer that can do this. With my (very) limited understanding of how printing in Chrome works:
At the point when the PDF data is generated, the semantics of input elements are already lost. This is also the reason why PDFs generated with Chrome and probably other browsers tend to be a bit larger in file size as those generated by text processors: They’re basically printing a vector graphic and hence are missing out on a bunch of text-related features PDF has. Interactivity features as well. As said, my knowledge is a bit limited, so I might be wrong ^^
I think you’re out of luck here. You can give wkhtmltopdf (i.e., the Webkit engine) a try, or possibly even pandoc if it’s enough for your needs; but you might find out that the HTML-to-PDF route doesn’t give you editable forms.
Alternatively, it might be possible to post-process the generated PDFs and replace the text boxes with editable fields on PostScript level, but this will be quite costly in terms of 
In any case, I’d be super happy to know which solution you chose in the end!
Thank you for taking the time to answer. Yeah, I thought so that it won’t work. I’ll have to research what we can use.
Hi,
somehow I just knew I’d run into this problem before trying out this package. The chrome.exe cannot be found. Running Win10 at work I’m afraid. It’s in the system path and a named env variable ‘chromium’. Not sure what else to do 
Also, given the problems around deploying puppeteer-pdf & elixir-pdf-generator to Gigalixir, do you have a recipe for deploying this package to Gigalixir / Heroku? Unless I can get a package working in production it’s not much help.
Otherwise I’m eager to use the package and it seemed to land just at the right time given the challenges the previous two packages were presenting.
[info] Running HSEPlanWeb.Endpoint with cowboy 2.8.0 at 0.0.0.0:4000 (http)
[info] Access HSEPlanWeb.Endpoint at http://localhost:4000
[info] Application sgre_hse_plan exited: HSEPlan.Application.start(:normal, ) returned an error: shutdown: failed to start child: ChromicPDF
** (EXIT) shutdown: failed to start child: ChromicPDF.Browser
** (EXIT) an exception was raised:
** (MatchError) no match of right hand side value: {:error, {%RuntimeError{message: “could not find executable from ["chromium-browser", "chromium", "google-chrome", "/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome"]”}, [{ChromicPDF.ChromeImpl, :chrome_executable, 0, [file: ‘lib/chromic_pdf/pdf/chrome_impl.ex’, line: 53]}, {ChromicPDF.ChromeImpl, :chrome_command, 1, [file: ‘lib/chromic_pdf/pdf/chrome_impl.ex’, line: 34]}, {ChromicPDF.ChromeImpl, :spawn, 1, [file: ‘lib/chromic_pdf/pdf/chrome_impl.ex’, line: 9]}, {ChromicPDF.Connection, :init, 1, [file: ‘lib/chromic_pdf/pdf/connection.ex’, line: 25]}, {:gen_server, :init_it, 2, [file: ‘gen_server.erl’, line: 374]}, {:gen_server, :init_it, 6, [file: ‘gen_server.erl’, line: 342]}, {:proc_lib, :init_p_do_apply, 3, [file: ‘proc_lib.erl’, line: 249]}]}}
(chromic_pdf 0.3.1) lib/chromic_pdf/pdf/browser.ex:43: ChromicPDF.Browser.init/1
(stdlib 3.8) gen_server.erl:374: :gen_server.init_it/2
(stdlib 3.8) gen_server.erl:342: :gen_server.init_it/6
(stdlib 3.8) proc_lib.erl:249: :proc_lib.init_p_do_apply/3
You should familiarize yourself with docker and build an image that includes Chrome. Then you can deploy it anywhere where docker deployment is possible.
It can be quite complex in the beginning. Is it something you are already doing for deployments?
Docker isn’t something I’ve ever touched, but I was reading through some of your comments here and was slowly realising that was probably something I needed to do. I was hoping not to have to though: my ‘app’ is trivial - it gets some json from Airtable and builds a pdf because my Airtable users want pdfs!
You can always use some paid service to convert the html to pdf for you. Then you don’t need to worry about it.
Search for “html to pdf as a service”
But, having said that, basic docker understanding will not harm you 
Very useful nowadays.
