Yazi can render previews for images and PDF files, but in my case, PDF previews weren’t showing up. Yazi requires Poppler for PDF previewing–and it was already installed on my system–the previews still didn’t work.

So I began debugging by running yazi --debug, which provides detailed information about your Yazi installation. Under the Dependencies section, I noticed a suspicious message:

pdftoppm      : ExitStatus(unix_wait_status(25344)),"pdftoppm version 4.0...

This should actually just render the version of pdftoppm by poppler like:

pdftoppm      : 25.04.0

So there was clearly some issue with Poppler and pdftoppm here.
Then I ran Yazi with a debug log enabled: YAZI_LOG=debug yazi
and checked the log file in ~/.local/state/yazi/yazi.log

And there was also an error:

ERROR yazi_scheduler::prework::prework: Error when running preloader pdf:
Failed to convert PDF to image, stderr: pdftoppm version 4.05 [www.xpdfreader.com]

It turns out that Xpdf was conflicting with the actual pdftoppm utility from Poppler. I had previously installed Xpdf for some reason, and it was now preventing Poppler from being installed properly. The error message confirmed the conflict:

Error: Cannot install poppler because conflicting formulae are installed.
xpdf: because poppler, pdftohtml, pdf2image, and xpdf install conflicting executables

So I uninstalled Xpdf via brew: brew unlink xpdf
Reinstalled Poppler via brew and now everything works nice:

The plan was to use chrome-php with a headless chrome to generate the PDF.

Usually you would install chrome/chromium on a linux server via apt and just run chrome from the PATH with chrome.
Since i was on shared hosting i was not sure if this was possible since i was not allowed to run apt commands.
So i tried to use Puppeteer which ships a headless chrome executable and use just this directly.
I installed Puppeteer with npm locally and uploaded the chrome executable to the shared hosting.
Puppeteer will place the headless chrome in the .cache dir in your home directory, f.e.:

~/.cache/puppeteer/chrome/linux-113.0.5672.63/chrome-linux64/chrome

Upload:

scp -r ~/.cache/puppeteer/chrome/linux-113.0.5672.63/chrome-linux64 me@sharedhosting:/usr/home/test

I also created a nice little command line tool to create the pdf with chrome-php.
I used minicli which is a “minimalist, dependency-free framework for building CLI-centric PHP applications”.
So you can create cli commands fast and without all the clutter, exactly what i needed for this small test.
You can find the code on Github: https://github.com/ivoba/chrome-php-minicli
The command is here: https://github.com/ivoba/chrome-php-minicli/blob/main/command.php

Then i tried to generate the pdf:
CHROME_PATH="/usr/home/test/chrome" php command.php pdf url=https://ivo-bathke.name

However this failed because the server lacked required dependencies to run the chrome executable.
You can check this by running this command:

me@sharedhosting:/usr/home/test$ ldd chrome-linux64/chrome | grep not
libatk-1.0.so.0 => not found
libatk-bridge-2.0.so.0 => not found
libxkbcommon.so.0 => not found
libatspi.so.0 => not found
libXcomposite.so.1 => not found
libXrandr.so.2 => not found
libgbm.so.1 => not found

Ok, so it wont work with the uploaded chrome executable.
What a pity but still a finding.

In the end i contacted the support and fortunatly they were willing and able to install chromium via apt. Nice!

Eventually it worked with:
CHROME_PATH="chromium" php command.php pdf url=https://ivo-bathke.name

Pdf created :)

Did you know you can also directly render those as PDF files?

It’s actually quite easy. Like so:

php bin/console workflow:dump myWorkflow | dot -Tpdf > data/workflow/myWorkflow.pdf

.WWF – ein PDF Format, dass sich nicht ausdrucken lässt.
Der Umwelt zuliebe.

Meine Rechnungen verschicke ich vielleicht trotzdem lieber nicht als .WWF,
aber coole Idee.

http://www.saveaswwf.com/de/