Is it possible to manipulate the css of PDF files using wkhtmltopdf?

[a0th]

Im assuming that a HTML file is created first, and that file is then converted to PDF.
Is is possible to manipulate the CSS used to generate the HTML, which would then affect the PDF?

[cscheid]

That's not how it works. Pandoc emits LaTeX that's then compiled to PDF with xelatex or a related tool.

[jimjam-slam]

The css option also works under format.pdf (alongside pdf-engine) in the individual post's frontmatter, which might be useful if you're running off both regular HTML (for a website) and a paged CSS PDF and need different style sheets for both 😊

---
title: "Test PDF report"
author: "James Goldie"
format:
  pdf:
    css: my-paged-pdf-styles.css
    pdf-engine: weasyprint
---

[knsamati]

I don't know if it is a bug or something I forget but It don't display the plot. For example:

---
title: "Test PDF report"
author: "James Goldie"
format:
  pdf:
    css: report.css
    pdf-engine: weasyprint
---

## Plot

```{r}
plot(pressure)

@jimjam-slam 

[cderv]

pdf-engine like this is not really (well) supported

• Other pdf engines like wkhtmltopdf and weasyprint? #222
• Quarto attempts to install LaTeX packages when using wkhtmltopdf as pdf engine #6084 (comment)

So it is highly possible that some stuff are not working properly

[mrworthington]

@cderv: you're right about it not working. I have a laptop where I did this right about the time I started commenting here. Now, when I apply the same steps, using pdf-engine: weasyprint with the CSS file doesn't actually apply the styles like it did when I first tried this.

It leaves me curious about Typst as a solution for generating nice PDF docs that have uniform styles (which it seems posit is learning towards), but I haven't found/forged a straightforward way of editing the layout + aesthetics of a Typst template within Quarto so that can the template can be recycled across multiple projects.

[cderv]

Typst is not using CSS. It has its own formatting and styling.

• https://typst.app/docs/tutorial/formatting/
• https://typst.app/docs/tutorial/advanced-styling/
• https://typst.app/docs/reference/styling/

All new stuff to learn.

Quarto allows some partials to customize template (https://quarto.org/docs/prerelease/1.4/typst.html#template-partials) and Pandoc has some variables that is allowed (https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#variables-for-typst)
Templates are at https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/tree/main/src/resources/formats/typst/pandoc/quarto and possibly styling requires tweaking those templates for now.

Now, when I apply the same steps, using pdf-engine: weasyprint with the CSS file doesn't actually apply the styles like it did when I first tried this.

I don't know if it was supposed to work before or not. But currently what you can do is

• Consider weasyprint is not integrated with Quarto
• Use quarto to build a HTML document
• Use weasyprint directly (or through pandoc - quarto pandoc ...) with html as your input source.

This should work as weasyprint is basically converting HTML to PDF.