Scriptable FOSS or inexpensive HTML-to-PDF utility that inserts page numbers into a table of contents

Question

I need a utility that can be called from an automation script to convert a CSS-styled HTML document to PDF. The twist is that I want to add page numbers for all the sections in the table of contents (and a page number in the footer of each page).

A colleague found a utility called Prince which does this, but it's pretty expensive--$3800 for a server license, or $495 per user, per machine.

Is there any FOSS alternative, or even some other commercially-available alternative which is less expensive; say, closer to the range of $100 per user or perhaps even $500 for a floating license?

Answer 1

DocRaptor is a hosted version of PrinceXML. It has a much less upfront cost than Prince, although sometimes fixed costs are advantageous (client projects, etc). Test documents are always free at DocRaptor.

Note: I work at DocRaptor.

Answer 2

pandoc can produce pdfs from a wide viriety of formats including HTML, (some sites pages better than others - beware ones with restricted fonts), via latex and if invoked with the --toc flag will embed in the latex instructions to generate a table of contents which should include page numbers once it has been rendered into a PDF by pdflatex|lualatex|xelatex - recommended for Windows is MikTeX.

You can also either accept the default footer, with the -s flag, or you can design your own template(s).

Pandoc is a command line utility and a Haskel library so you should have no problems calling from a script.

Both Pandoc and MikTex are free and open source. Pandoc is cross platform and will work with LaTeX engines on other platforms as well as with MikTex on Windows.