Qt – wkhtmltopdf patched qt

or try this (from http://drupal.org/node/870058)

1. Download wkhtmltopdf. Or better install it with a package manager:

   sudo apt-get install wkhtmltopdf
   

2. Extract it and move it to /usr/local/bin/

3. Rename it to wkhtmltopdf so that now you have an executable at /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf
4. Set permissions: sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf

5. Install required support packages.

   sudo apt-get install openssl build-essential xorg libssl-dev
   

6. Check to see if it works: run

   /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf http://www.google.com test.pdf
   

   If it works, then you are done. If you get the error "Cannot connect to X server" then continue to number 7.

7. We need to run it headless on a 'virtual' x server. We will do this with a package called xvfb.

   sudo apt-get install xvfb
   

8. We need to write a little shell script to wrap wkhtmltopdf in xvfb. Make a file called wkhtmltopdf.sh and add the following:

   xvfb-run -a -s "-screen 0 640x480x16" wkhtmltopdf "$@"
   

9. Move this shell script to /usr/local/bin, and set permissions:

   sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf.sh
   

10. Check to see if it works once again: run

    /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf.sh http://www.google.com test.pdf
    

Note that http://www.google.com may throw an error like "A finished ResourceObject received a loading finished signal. This might be an indication of an iframe taking to long to load." You may want to test with a simpler page like http://www.example.com.

You can check for the exit status of each command, as freetx answered, but this is manual error checking rather than exception handling. The standard way to get the equivalent of exception handling in sh is to start the script with set -e. That tells sh to exit with a non-zero status as soon as any executed command fails (i.e. exits with a non-zero exit status).

If it is intended for some command in such a script to (possibly) fail, you can use the construct COMMAND || true, which will force a zero exit status for that expression. For example:

#!/bin/sh

# if any of the following fails, the script fails
set -e
mkdir -p destdir/1/2
mv foo destdir/1/2
touch /done || true    # allowed to fail

Another way to ensure that you are notified when things go wrong in a script invoked by cron is to adhere to the Unix convention of printing nothing unless an error ocurred. Successful runs will then pass without notice, and unsuccessful runs will cause the cron daemon to notify you of the error via email. Note that local mail delivery must be correctly configured on your system for this to work.