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You don't have to use a browser. I had very good results with Weasyprint [0]. And there's also PrinceXML [1] if you're willing to pay.

[0]: https://weasyprint.org/ [1]: https://www.princexml.com/



PrinceXML is expensive but I feel it's worth the money. I've used it to layout several RPGs with Markdown source files and HTML and CSS for templates and styling. RPG layouts can be quite complex with stat blocks and the like and it's handled everything I've thrown at it.


Weasy is tight. Unfortunately, my org banned Python across the board, else that would have been my choice.


I feel like there's a story here.


Nothing all that exciting, I'm afraid. The new director of InfoSec must have watched a Cable News Show about supply chain attacks, or something, so suddenly anything with package management - pip, npm, gem, etc - was banned from the official Windows policy. Since his flunkies didn't want to get nailed, they just went ahead and flushed any associated environments/runtimes too. It wasn't super consistent. It was, however, generally a surprise - you'd log in one Monday and whoops! Where'd my Python tooling go?

Now, ok, funny thing. Engineering could just get bare metal laptops, whenever they wanted, then blow the thrice-blessed CentOS image on it, and then do whatever the hell. So what happened - and this probably sounds real predictable - they used the CentOS machines to make all sorts of nutty crap, boxed it up, and then sent it back to their "official" Windows machines, now as a locked-in-amber config that never updates, even if five years later it had like fifty zero days in it and none of the libraries were good anymore.

I understand it took a new director and a LOT of meetings to explain whitelist mirrors for package managers, but I was long gone by then, even if I had a tiny hand in rolling out the demo whitelist mirror on-prem. Man, I had no idea what I was doing . . it still makes me shudder when I think of the things they were asking me to do.




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