从php将远程网页打印为pdf

Question

I read a lot of topics about scripts that compute html and output pdf; I tried lots of them, and I am always disapointed in the results. Lots of them don't consider the external CSS, lots of them can't be executed from shared hosting (need to be installed in some unaccessible places, like DOMPDF), etc. Also, lots of the threads on the question are pretty old (most of them've been asked in 2010).

Question: Is there a simple way to cURL (from a php script) a remote web page and simply save a pdf of the "print" (like in css media print) version of the page, or even a jpeg, or a docx, or anything that "contains" the images and the styling for offline viewing? And more important, can it be free/open source?

All the web browsers do that with no effort. Once on the page, only press ctrl-p and there it goes (almost). Why is it so trivial to find a good script that can do this? Is there a way to emulate a browser, or what...?

Isn't it possible to cURL and force css media print, then take a snapshot of this?

The difficulty to find this seems very strange to me... I feel like it's a quite simple task.

Answer 1

Try to call wkhtmltox from PHP.

wkhtmltox/bin/wkhtmltopdf www.stackoverflow.com stackoverflow.pdf

This PHP library seems to work with wkhtmltox: http://thejoyofcoding.org/php-wkhtmltox/

This might help: http://davidbomba.com/php-wkhtmltox/