Document command-line option for papersize and orientation

[RichardNeill]

It would be nice if weasyprint supported command-line flags to specify the orientation and paper size.

I'm aware that this can be specified within the document, using e.g.

<style>
@page {
  size: A3 landscape;
}
</style>

Or that we can apply a stylesheet with -s.

So, why would this be this useful?

1. simplicity.
2. weasyprint is a great replacement to, and improvement on, the (now unsupported) wkhtmltopdf, and it would be nice if it could work compatibly, for ease of drop-in replacement. E.g.

cat input.html | wkhtmltopdf -O Landscape -s A3 - output.pdf

Thanks for your time, and an amazing product.

[liZe]

Hi!

Thanks for your proposal, and glad to see that WeasyPrint is useful for you!

We usually try to avoid command-line flags for features that can be done with CSS, because we can’t easily cover all the features that could be useful: after size and orientation, we’d like to change page margins, bleed, background color, etc. It’s also hard to handle more complex cases: what do we do if the document’s CSS defines different sizes for different pages?

Hopefully, there’s a way to set CSS directly in command line. In your case, you can for example do:

weasyprint input.html output.pdf -s <(echo "@page {size: A3 landscape}")

It’s a bit longer, but it lets users specify all the CSS properties they want. Would that be useful for you?

[RichardNeill]

Thank you. That's actually a really neat trick - I didn't know about bash process-subsitution before, and I learned something new. I originally saw the -s and thought "I'm going to need to create another tempfile in my pipeline, or have to mangle the document with sed to inject an inline <style>".

For future users like me, who resort first to the man page and search for keywords like "size" and "orientation", may I suggest that something like this would be a nice addition to the man page:

SECTION: paper size and orientation

The output PDF size and orientation defaults to A4 portrait. It ignores the PAPERSIZE and LC_PAPER environment variables. 
It can be specified in CSS via the media @page rule, either within the document or via an external css file. 
To apply it on the command-line, use e:g
 -s <(echo "@page {size: A3 landscape}")

[liZe]

For future users like me, who resort first to the man page and search for keywords like "size" and "orientation", may I suggest that something like this would be a nice addition to the man page:

It could be useful to change/add content in the "Adjust Document Dimensions" section. Would you be interested in opening a pull request?