Converting HTML files to PDF

If you have the funding, nothing beats Prince XML as this video shows

Check out iText; it is a pure Java PDF toolkit which has support for reading data from HTML. I used it recently in a project when I needed to pull content from our CMS and export as PDF files, and it was all rather straightforward. The support for CSS and style tags is pretty limited, but it does render tables without any problems (I never managed to set column width though).

Creating a PDF from HTML goes something like this:

Document doc = new Document(PageSize.A4);
PdfWriter.getInstance(doc, out);
doc.open();
HTMLWorker hw = new HTMLWorker(doc);
hw.parse(new StringReader(html));
doc.close();

Did you try WKHTMLTOPDF?

It's a simple shell utility, an open source implementation of WebKit. Both are free.

We've set a small tutorial here

EDIT( 2017 ):

If it was to build something today, I wouldn't go that route anymore.
But would use http://pdfkit.org/ instead.
Probably stripping it of all its nodejs dependencies, to run in the browser.

The Flying Saucer XHTML renderer project has support for outputting XHTML to PDF. Have a look at an example here.