how to convert a HTML web page into a PDF file using Java

Question

i've been searching on the internet on how to convert a HTML page into a PDF file using Java. i found a lot of pointers, and in short, they don't work or are too difficult to implement. i also downloaded a commercial product, pdf4ml; the API is something i'd be happy to work with, except that when i crawled a simple page on wikipedia, i get a out of memory error (setting Xmx to 1024 M). in some approaches, they suggest converting HTML -> XHTML -> FO -> PDF. however, i am getting a lot of exceptions for the XHTML-to-FO XLS file; and reading the documentations, it's not something that i have enough time to understand right now.

here are my questions/concerns. 1. is there another cohesive API out there that will easily convert HTML to PDF (commercial or not)? 2. is there a way i can simply capture a HTML page and store it as a single file. this approach would be similar to using internet explorer's way of saving a web page as a web archive (single file, MHT format)?

any help is appreciated. (btw, i know this question has been asked repeatedly, but in addition to the original spirit of the question, i'm opened to other ways). thanks.

Answer 1

Try wkhtmltopdf, which is using WebKit. Another option (I'm using that currently) is using OpenOffice (remote controlled via macros).