You can also use the wkhtmltopdf program but then you’d likely have the same problem.
So either Docker or a small VPS which you can fully control.
dimitarvp
shotleybuilder
Yes, there was a service I looked at earlier in this journey when I was converting from a csv download using Panpipe, but I wasn’t building .html then. But now that I am it’s good to be reminded that I should revisit that. Easy to route a call to another api …
In the meantime I’m watching a Docker tutorial 
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maltoe
@shotleybuilder Sorry for the late reply
I’d be very interested to hear if you could get ChromicPDF to work on a Windows host. It should theoretically be able to communicate with the remote debugging channel through pipes on Windows as well, but maybe the command line switches are different.
a named env variable ‘chromium’
Does you mean the binary is called chromium? Otherwise, here’s the list of executable names ChromicPDF tries to launch Chrome with. If you need it to look for chrome.exe, you could try to checkout the library locally, configure it as local dependency {:chromic_pdf, path: "..."} in your project, and add chrome.exe to this list.
With regards to deployment: Yes, docker is definitely your best option. Then, you also don’t need to get it running on Windows anymore
1
Hermanverschooten
Sebb
This looks interesting.
Right now I’m building PDFs using CSS3-paged-media and https://docraptor.com. ChromicPDF with https://www.pagedjs.org/ could be an alternative.
@maltoe there is a broken link in the readme: https://hexdocs.pm/chromic_pdf/examples/phoenix
For anyone interested in generating high quality PDFs I highly recommend https://print-css.rocks/
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timkonieczny
@maltoe Thanks for this great package - makes pdf generation a lot easier!
Is there a way to link a stylesheet in the footer template?
Currently I’m
- rendering a footer template
- converting it to a string with
HTML.safe_to_string() - adding it as a footer with
ChromicPDF.Template.source_and_options() - and generating a temporary file with
ChromicPDF.print_to_pdf(), that is being downloaded in the:outputcallback
I’m linking a stylesheet in the footer via an absolute path like this:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="<%= AppWeb.Endpoint.static_url() %><%= Routes.static_path(@conn, "/assets/app.css") %>"/>
This works well for the PDF content but when I link the stylesheet in the footer I get the following error:
** (exit) an exception was raised:
** (RuntimeError) Timeout in Channel.run_protocol/3!
The underlying GenServer.call/3 exited with a timeout. This happens when the browser was
not able to complete the current operation (= PDF print job) within the configured
5000 milliseconds.
If you are printing large PDFs and expect long processing times, please consult the
documentation for the `timeout` option of the session pool.
If you are *not* printing large PDFs but your print jobs still time out, this is likely a
bug in ChromicPDF. Please open an issue on the issue tracker.
Any suggestions?
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maltoe
Hey @timkonieczny
to be honest I’ve never tried loading an external stylesheet in the header or footer templates. We usually have some kind of PDFView helper module (like Phoenix.View but with added PDF-related functionality) which has functions to render the stylesheets inline into the markup. See the examples/phoenix directory for an example of how something like this can be done (though it can also be done totally differently )
I reproduced the behaviour you’ve seen and took a look into the protocol messages: it turns out the inspector is crashing when you give it external URLs in the footer/header templates (at least on Chrome 96) - so I guess the answer to your question is: “No, it doesn’t work.”
%{"method" => "Inspector.targetCrashed", "params" => %{}, "sessionId" => "8041679B6EF313C3F4346A7C239D4F91"}
I’ll add a note about this to the docs, and perhaps extend the error message of this exception a bit to include the last message received or so. Thanks for letting me know.
Best,
malte
1
maltoe
img tags don’t crash, by the way, but simply remain unloaded. So my best guess is that the header/footer renderers don’t have network connectivity at all, plus for some reason the link tag makes the inspect explode. 
Chrome is weird.
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