If you’re looking to give your users a simple & elegant way to turn Web pages into PDF files so that they can access them later or offline, then this free, open source tool may be your ticket.
Athena uses Electron, a command line interface (CLI) tool, together with a Go language microservice to accomplish this.
Until Athena came along, if you wanted to brew your own CLI-based conversion solution, you were pretty much stuck with another headless open source tool: wkhtmltopdf, which has a reputation for being a bit unrelaiable & crashing unexpectedly when printing docs with invalid HTML or CSS.
Athena was designed to do just one thing & to do it well: PDF conversions. It’s also designed to work well with other programs by using the universal interface of handling text streams. It provides a no frills, on-demand way of converting HTML to print quality PDFs in any paper size. It has an ‘aggressive’ mode with which your conversions are high quality even when CSS is damaged or missing.
Due to the nature of its simple packaging, you can deploy Athena anywhere Docker is installed (Docker is a widely used packaging solution that allows you to deploy scalable services, securely & reliably, on a wide range of platforms). Athena comes bundled with its Go component, Weaver, which is a HTTP server deployed as a microservice. Weaver can be deployed on a unix server environment or if you want to take it to the next level & scale it on the cloud, it can be configured as a convert farm on Amazon Elastic Container Service.
Athena development is led by Arachnys, a London,UK-based Company (they also have offices in New York) that provides intelligent risk & compliance tech for investment banks, financial tech startups, & agencies that fight money laundering & corruption. Full source code is freely available on GitHub.
Image Credit: Athena
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