The State of myCFML PDF Generation
My current comparison is with CFDocument on the deprecated CF2016 Developer Edition. I'm planning on performing tests with CF2021 & CF2023 soon and will perform this on my personal developer workstation using CommandBox and a testing framework that I'm in the process of developing. I have not personally downloaded or used CF2025 yet1. I believe that it may be using the same iText library as CF10. (Can anyone confirm this?) I also haven't compared with Lucee 5.3+ Flying Saucer implementation.
This will be a part of a series as I intend on performing a lot more tests as well as sharing tips that we've learned on how to improve overall PDF quality, performance and file size.
Technologies
CFDocument Built-in Adobe ColdFusion function that creates PDF output from a text block containing CFML and HTML. (NOTE: Some ACF overhead may occur due to adding the "Adobe ColdFusion Developer/Trial Edition - Not for Production Use" watermark.)
CFHTMLtoPDF Built-in Adobe ColdFusion function that creates PDFs from HTML using a WebKit based rendering engine. Some ACF overhead may occur due to adding the "Adobe ColdFusion Developer/Trial Edition - Not for Production Use" watermark. I tried testing this on a CF2016 Standard production server, but got the error message "No Service manager is available.". (We don't use CFHTMLTOPDF, so it may be disabled at the CFAdmin level.)
WKHTMLTOPDF (LGPLv3; portable) tends to be faster and generate smaller PDFs. It can also run concurrently and generate PDFs in the background without using a ColdFusion thread or impacting the Java heap memory. Download
Ghostscript (GNU GPL Affero license; portable) is an interpreter for the PostScript(R) language and PDF files. It runs on various embedded operating systems and platforms including Windows, macOS, the wide variety of Unix and Unix-like platforms, and VMS systems. Download
Test an empty page with only a "Hello World" H1 header
There's a huge differences in the generation file size and the Ghostscript optimization doesn't make much of a difference.
| Server | Engine | Generation | FileSize | Ghostscript Duration | Ghostscript Filesize | Percent Smaller |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CF2016 | CFDocument | 486 ms | 40,837 | 10 ms | 40,068 | 1.89% |
| CF2016 | CFHTMLTOPDF | 1286 ms | 77,179 | 9 ms | 98,953 | -28.20% |
| CF2016 | WKHTMLTOPDF | 223 ms | 7,539 | 9 ms | 5,167 | 31.47% |
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en"><head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello World</h1>
</body>
</html>
Tests with a locally-downloaded 4.7mb NASA JPG image rendered at 400px wide.
The difference regarding file size is a much wider gap here for CFDocument. Using Ghostscript to optimize results in a much smaller CFDocument.
| Server | Engine | Generation | FileSize | Ghostscript Duration | Ghostscript Filesize | Percent Smaller |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CF2016 | CFDocument | 8,046 ms | 24,311,787 | 50 ms | 74,478 | 99.693% |
| CF2016 | CFHTMLTOPDF | 2,256 ms | 120,258 | 1017 ms | 136,211 | -11.71% |
| CF2016 | WKHTMLTOPDF | 1,638 ms | 492,115 | 45 ms | 21,012 | 95.73% |
I also ran this test script on a production server for CFDocument to eliminate the watermark and the filesize was consistent 24mb, but the Ghostscript result was 47,028 (36.86% smaller if no watermark exists) and still twice as large as WKHTMLTOPDF.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en"><head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello World</h1>
<img src="/tempdirectory/images_yyyymmddHHnnss.jpg" width="400" height="248" border="1">
</body>
</html>
1 I haven't personally interacted with CF2025 beyond accessing it online via CFFiddle. I haven't had any time to read the terms and do not wish to be legally bound by any rules that I may not be fully understand. Back to text
Source Code
https://gist.github.com/JamoCA/b957c34cddea38f4bd2d777b41e348ac
Hi James, how were you able to test CFHTMLTOPDF with CommandBox? I tried to configure Adobe PDFServlet but It wouldn't work