ReLaXed
Productivity
document generation
SHOW HN2018
344points
79comments
#58of 2,155 in 2018
Top 3%of 2018 by points
How HN took it
CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments
10 positive, 26 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 8 critical, out of 45 comments about the project. Thread score +0.02.
Execution: 1 for, 5 againstIdea: 5 for, 0 againstDocs: 2 for, 0 againstDesign: 1 for, 1 againstPerformance: 0 for, 2 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Impressive and useful for many people
From 1 comment
The examples lack hyphenation, which partly explains the too-variable interword spacing. Is this because Chrome still fails to support hyphenation, unlike, for example, Firefox?…
leephillips on HN
Pug/SCSS is a natural alternative to LaTeX for documents
From 2 comments
Interesting project! Can this be used to potentially include JavaScript in resulting PDF files and use them to animate images in the PDF? This would be useful for some…
lkurusa on HNAll I want is a system that gets the basic right and is version-controllable in git (plain text source code). Latex is just ridiculously complex and inconsistent. Even after…
felixfbecker on HN
Objections
Typography and line breaking lack quality compared to LaTeX
From 3 comments
The examples lack hyphenation, which partly explains the too-variable interword spacing. Is this because Chrome still fails to support hyphenation, unlike, for example, Firefox?…
leephillips on HNSeems kind of neat. But for my purposes I will still use Markdown to PDF using pandoc etc. What really upsets me... the typography still looks shit compared to LaTeX... MS Word /…
che371291 on HNOh how much i would love to have good way how to generate print quality PDFs. The real problem is not hyphenation but how lines are composed. If you want even lines in type set…
omnimus on HN
Chrome printing lacks page numbering, footnotes and advanced print CSS
From 3 comments
How would that compare to, say, an HTML template + wkhtmltopdf? Also I feel like the biggest gripe with generating (long) PDFs from HTML are things such as page numbering,…
Ecco on HNThat will probably be difficult because Chrome just "prints" a PDF. Therefore headers, footers, footnotes, and page numbering is a difficult issue to solve.
sebazzz on HNLooks like it uses headless chrome for HTML to PDF conversion so its not going to support advanced print CSS like Prince. Real issue is Prince is the only browser that supports…
SigmundA on HN
Requests
Hyphenation and better justification
From 2 comments
The examples lack hyphenation, which partly explains the too-variable interword spacing. Is this because Chrome still fails to support hyphenation, unlike, for example, Firefox?…
leephillips on HNhttps://github.com/bramstein/typeset This is an implementation of the line breaking algorithm used in TeX in Javascript. It would be nice to add to obtain better typographic…
agussell on HN
Footnotes and automatic references example
From 1 comment
Waiting to see an example with footnotes and auto references ;)
killercup on HN
Table of contents generation
From 1 comment
Not OP, but one of the most useful things about wkhtmltopdf is its ability to create an index page (edit: TOC) with references to all heading tags (<h1>,...). Is this something…
Drdrdrq on HN
Questions
How does it compare with Prince and Pandoc
From 2 comments
How does this compare with Prince?
williamscales on HNHow does this improve upon Pandoc? https://i.imgur.com/tMkMjNV.png In the image, ConTeXt generates PDFs. The EA box represents HTML documentation exported from Enterprise…
thangalin on HN
Does it support MathJax and LaTeX math mode
From 2 comments
Very cool. Could standard Latex mathmode be used here?
wyas on HNDoes it support things like mathjax? This is a really important question to me.
baby on HN
Can it output CMYK colors
From 1 comment
Looks awesome. Can it use CMYK colors? That is killer feature for print centers.
czechdeveloper on HN
Alternatives named
Prince
From 2 comments
How does this compare with Prince?
williamscales on HNHave you looked at Prince [1]? It's commercial, but highly regarded. The coolest project I've seen with it is OMA (Rem Koolhaas' architecture firm), which uses it to print…
lobster_johnson on HN
Pandoc
From 2 comments
How does this improve upon Pandoc? https://i.imgur.com/tMkMjNV.png In the image, ConTeXt generates PDFs. The EA box represents HTML documentation exported from Enterprise…
thangalin on HNI find Markdown most natural for writing because I do not have to worry about formatting or syntax. Currently I deliver ~2 PDF reports per week using Ulysses or MacDown for…
buildbuildbuild on HN
LaTeX
From 1 comment
The examples lack hyphenation, which partly explains the too-variable interword spacing. Is this because Chrome still fails to support hyphenation, unlike, for example, Firefox?…
leephillips on HN
wkhtmltopdf
From 1 comment
How would that compare to, say, an HTML template + wkhtmltopdf? Also I feel like the biggest gripe with generating (long) PDFs from HTML are things such as page numbering,…
Ecco on HN
Apache FOP
From 1 comment
Related, why doesn't anyone ever mention [Apache FOP](https://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/) for this kind of thing? I've had great success with it.
nateroling on HN
DocRaptor
From 1 comment
DocRaptor is PrinceXML as a service with reasonable pricing. https://docraptor.com
zrail on HN