Athena: Beautiful PDF

Our customer wanted APIs documentation as PDF file.

We document our APIs in Open API. Attempts to export bootprint-openapi pages with help of pandoc or MS Office / Libre Office export was a fail - broken pages. May be that was because of bug in the bootprint-openapi that I found and fixed later - I do not know.

I did not want to create mine version of bootprint-openapi, that produces html good enough for MS Word - too much effort for the task.

And I found just a beautiful project to solve my problem - Athena Elegant PDF conversion.

It has two features to be beautiful.

For 1st PDF is just exact representation of what I see in web browser. In fact it takes screen shot so no wonder here but still great.

For 2nd Athena developers made their product extremly easy to use.

You want web service to convert on the fly? Ok:

docker pull arachnysdocker/athenapdf-service
http://<docker-address>:8080/convert?auth=arachnys-weaver&url=http://blog.arachnys.com/

I wanted convert files beforehand (that is very fast process, 1-2 seconds, but still not pleasant pause).

Ok for that I use Makefile:

for API in docker/docs/target/*/; \
    do docker run --rm -v ${PWD}:/converted/ arachnysdocker/athenapdf athenapdf $${API}/index.html $${API}/$$(basename $${API}).pdf; \
done

In logs I see a lot of errors like:

Xlib:  extension "RANDR" missing on display ":99".

But everithing works fine so I did not bother to understand why I have this errors in logs.

And you have to take into account this Electron’s bug (Athena is written with Electron): Duplication of thead, and other table related issues

My workaround:

sed -i "\$athead {display:table-row-group;}" /docs/$API/main.css

I am still in wonder from Docker - one line and your not so small problem is solved!