MarkdownToPdf

Convert markdown document to html/pdf using VisualBasic in a super easy way! This is a small VB.NET wrapper utility around wkhtmltopdf console tool. You can use it to easily convert Markdown/HTML reports to PDF.

wkhtmltopdf cli wrapper code translate from https://github.com/codaxy/wkhtmltopdf.

Feature

Convert markdown/html document to PDF
Custom CSS style supports. (Works in progress)
Html template rendering engine for do automatically data analysis report

How to install

Clone the source code in this repository
Open in VisualStudio 2017 and restore the nuget package sciBASIC#
compile
Extract wkhtmltopdf binary distributes from ./dist/wkhtmltopdf.7z package to app release folder
Run app in cmd/bash or shell scripting for batch converts of the PDF documents.

Usage

First of all, please make sure the encoding of your console is UTF8. Utf8 encoding is the default encoding of the html document:

Console.InputEncoding = Encoding.UTF8

Convert: from URL source

PdfConvert.Environment.Debug = False
PdfConvert.ConvertHtmlToPdf(New PdfDocument With {
    .Url = "input.html"
}, New PdfOutput With {
    .OutputFilePath = "output.pdf"
})

PdfConvert.ConvertHtmlToPdf(New PdfDocument With {
    .Url = "input.html",
    .HeaderLeft = "[title]",
    .HeaderRight = "[date] [time]",
    .FooterCenter = "Page [page] of [topage]"
}, New PdfOutput With {
    .OutputFilePath = "output.pdf"
})

Convert: given html content

PdfConvert.ConvertHtmlToPdf(New PdfDocument With {
    .Html = "<html><h1>test</h1></html>"
}, New PdfOutput With {
    .OutputFilePath = "inline.pdf"
})
PdfConvert.ConvertHtmlToPdf(New PdfDocument With {
    .Html = "<html><h1>測試</h1></html>"
}, New PdfOutput With {
    .OutputFilePath = "inline_cht.pdf"
})

Demo: hello world

Actually, you can construct a html document content from XElement directly in your VB code:

' In this case, we use HTMLDocument object instead of PdfDocument object
Dim html As New HTMLDocument With {
    .HTML = 
    <html>
        <head>
            <title>Hello World!</title>
        </head>
        <body>
            <h1>Hello World!!!</h1>
            <hr/>
            <h2>Example code</h2>
            <code>
                <pre>
                    Public Function Main() As Integer
                        Call println("Hello world!")
                        Return 0
                    End Function
                </pre>
            </code>
            <h4>Another header</h4>
            <table>
                <thead>
                    <tr>
                        <th>1</th>
                        <th>2</th>
                        <th>3</th>
                    </tr>
                </thead>
                <tr>
                    <td>a</td>
                    <td>b</td>
                    <td>c</td>
                </tr>
            </table>
            <footer style="position:fixed; font-size:.8em; text-align:right; bottom:0px; margin-left:-25px; height:20px; width:100%;">
                Here is the PDF document footer.
            </footer>
        </body>
    </html>
}
Call println(html.GetDocument)
Call PdfConvert.ConvertHtmlToPdf(html, App.HOME & "/hello-world.pdf")

CLI Usage

# markdown2pdf
markdown2pdf ./input.md
# Due to the reason of markdown parser is compatible with html format, 
# so that convert from a html file is also works fine!
markdown2pdf ./input.html

Html template engine

There are some special placeholer can be used for the html template rendering:

[#page] for create page number dynamics
[#h1] for create the master header numbers
[#h2] for create the secondary header numbers
[#h3] for create the header numbers in third level
[#h4] for create the header numbers in fourth level
[#fig] for create the figure numbers
[#tab] for create the table numbers

Dependence

sciBASIC

# http://github.com/xieguigang/sciBASIC
# install via nuget 
PM> Install-Package sciBASIC -Pre

Licence

This project is available under MIT Licence.

MIT licence. Copyright (c) 2017 しゃけいよしつな