The easiet way to format and create PDFs is to write them first as HTML and then convert them to PDF. wkhtmltopdf is a command line tool that let’s you do this. Let’s do it with GoLang.
First, you start with an html template. This template could as well be a file on your computer.
htmlTemplate := `
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<h1>{{.FirstName}} {{.LastName}}</h1>
<p>{{.JobTitle}}</p>
<h2>Skills</h2>
<ul>
{{range .Skills}}
<li>{{.}}</li>
{{end}}
</ul>
</body>
</html>
`And a struct that will be used to populate the html template.
type Person struct {
FirstName string
LastName string
JobTitle string
Skills []string
}Next, generate an in-memory HTML buffer using the html/template package.
var htmlBuffer bytes.Buffer
err := template.Must(template.New("html").
Parse(htmlTemplate)).
Execute(&htmlBuffer, person)person is a pointer to a Person struct.
Once you have the HTML buffer, you can convert it to PDF using github.com/SebastiaanKlippert/go-wkhtmltopdf. This package is just a wrapper around wkhtmltopdf.
pdfGen, _ := wkhtmltopdf.NewPDFGenerator()
page := wkhtmltopdf.NewPageReader(bytes.NewReader(htmlBuffer.Bytes()))
pdfGen.AddPage(page)
pdfGen.WriteFile("test.pdf")The above snippet will convert the HTML buffer to a PDF.
I have created github.com/theterminalguy/wkhtmltopdf-golang-docker that contains a production ready dockerized example. Feel free to use it as a starting point for your own projects.