PDFKiln

PDFKiln is a free, open-source (MIT) command-line tool that converts HTML to PDF and to images. It is a drop-in replacement for wkhtmltopdf, which was archived in 2023 and has had no release since 2020: called as wkhtmltopdf, PDFKiln accepts the same command line (all 122 options of wkhtmltopdf 0.12.6, with the same defaults, messages and exit codes) and renders with a current, sandboxed Chromium instead of wkhtmltopdf's old Qt WebKit.

Existing integrations keep working without a line of code changing. The own test suites of pdfkit, knp-snappy, phpwkhtmltopdf and wicked_pdf pass with PDFKiln in place of wkhtmltopdf, and Odoo and ERPNext find it in the PATH. On a corpus of 32 real templates (Odoo, ERPNext, Sylius, pandoc), it gives the same page count as wkhtmltopdf on all 32. Covers, tables of contents, text and HTML headers and footers with their variables, outlines and links between documents are supported, and wkhtmltoimage is provided too.

Called as pdfkiln, it offers its own interface with modern print defaults: print media, paper size, margins, headers and footers taken from the page's CSS (@page and its margin boxes).

Each release ships the latest stable Chromium with its security fixes. Extra options add a conversion timeout and block requests to private network addresses. PDFKiln is distributed as a signed APT repository for Debian and Ubuntu (amd64 and arm64), a Windows installer, a Scoop bucket, a Homebrew tap, Linux and macOS archives, a Docker image, a Composer package and an npm package.