Why Does CFHTMLTOPDF Suck?

In case anyone finds this thread while using (or considering) CF2023 and beyond, note that CF2023 added a new underlying engine for the PDF generation done by cfhtmltopdf, and that new engine handles most HTML (including html5), CSS (including css3), javascript, SVG and such, in a way to more faithfully render PDFs, compared to the original cfhtmltopdf engine discussed in this thread (and definitely better than the old engine still underlying cfdocument--unchanged in cf2023).

This new engine for cfhtmltopdf is a licensed copy of the commercial engine from pdfreactor.com, and it supports embedded video, audio, flexbot layouts, css grid layouts, PDF/A confirmance options, and more. There are also some new features for its creation of headers and footers.

The new engine is enabled in the CF Admin "pdf service" page with a default "engine" version of 2, so there's no code change needed to leverage the new capabilities. It's still implemented as the "add on service" like has been true for cfhtmltopdf since it came out in CF11/2014. And unlike when cfhtmltopdf first came out, the new engine is supported on all platforms CF supports (windows, linux, macos, solaris). To be clear, the new engine is NOT available for CF2021 or earlier.

For more, see Adobe's blog posts and docs such as:

• https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2023/05/coldfusion-2023-html-to-pdf/
• https://helpx.adobe.com/coldfusion/using/coldfusion-enhanced-pdf.html

Finally, there's a talk on the new cfhtmltopdf and its engine from the Online CF Summit (happening last month and this month) and the recording for that session will be posted along with others over time at Adobe's youtube page, at this playlist for the online summit.

In addition to Charlie's comments (and don't overlook the improvements between CF11 and CF2016 as he suggested), I'll add that Adobe announced a significant overhaul of CFHTMLtoPDF coming in CF2018 (aka Aether), which should significantly improve the quality of the PDFs it produces.

It's quite possible that the version of WKHTMLtoPDF that you are using is newer than the version embedded in CF11 (which CFHTMLtoPDF is using under the hood).  It might have been updated to a newer version in CF2016.

-Carl

I get that you may just want to vent, but if you’re open to fixing whatever you see as amiss, I have a few thoughts.

First, can you offer an example? Something that someone else can try, to confirm that the problem you see is indeed generic to CF and not your specific setup? And was your revisit on CF2016, with its latest update, 5? Was the “problem” you saw the same in both CF11 and CF2-16? If you can’t share code, or even a PDF to demonstrate the issue, can you explain what was “wrong” with the result?

Next, you refer to wxhtmltopdf, and wx. Did you mean wkhtmltopdf, and wk instead? I don’t ask to be snarky: I ask because CFHTMLtoPDF is indeed just Adobe’s implementation of wk. Yeah, really.

That’s all the more reason why I wonder if your issue may be about configuration. I’ve not heard of it being so terrible as you assert (though perhaps others have). Indeed, the whole reason for it being added was to do better html to pdf generation than cfdocument.

/charlie