CourtBouillon

Why a survey?

As for many open-source tools, knowing the needs of our users has always been complicated. Of course, we can rely on GitHub’s issues, we can discuss while solving problems for our customers, we can spend some time on our chat, to learn what would be useful for the majority of users. But in these cases, we only get a small part of the overview.

First of all, we would like to thank our sponsors for their support. They give us the time to improve WeasyPrint, for their needs and for everybody. We would also like to thank everybody who took the time to answer this survey: your answers are precious to provide a tool fully adapted to your use cases.

Results

How long have you been using WeasyPrint?

WeasyPrint has got a lot of new followers since CourtBouillon’s birth, so it’s not a surprise to see that most of our users have been using WeasyPrint for less than 2 years.

In which context do you use WeasyPrint?

Even if WeasyPrint has been created to solve problems in a professional context, it’s interesting to see that more than 40% use it for personal projects.

Where do you use WeasyPrint?

European countries are well represented in this map, with Germany (17), France (10), the Netherlands (4) and the United Kingdom (4) trusting 4 of the 5 first places. The United States (7) is at the 3^rd place.

What kind of documents do you generate?

Among the other results, we got resumes, legal and technical documents, educational material, books, and much more.

On which platform do you use WeasyPrint?

If Linux is the main platform, we can see that more than 25% use Windows, and more than 20% use macOS. WSL has also been mentioned.

Various cloud-based solutions have been given in comments too: AWS, Lambda, Google Cloud Platform. Containers (mainly Docker) are also largely used.

What are the main difficulties you have with WeasyPrint?

Reported difficulties are very diversified, but some problems have been mentioned more than once:

• missing modern CSS features,
• performance and memory problems,
• no easy debugging solutions,
• installation and dependencies management,
• SVG support,
• right-to-left and vertical text…

Which features would you like to have in WeasyPrint?

The first two places are taken by two long-awaited features: grid layout and footnotes support. No surprise about that, a lot of users had already upvoted the corresponding issues!

Performance is also very important for our users: faster generation and smaller PDFs take the third and fourth places of this epic battle.

Geospatial PDF and iframes aren’t really popular and close the pack 🚲, just behind right-to-left support (with a surprising low mark).

Do you know our OpenCollective campaign?

Almost 75% of our users are already supporting us, or are willing to. That’s heartwarming 💖!

All this support gives us a lot of courage to give WeasyPrint all the love it deserves. Having financial support gives us more and more time to improve the tool and its dependencies, and to make it closer to your dreams 🪄.

Don’t hesitate to support us on OpenCollective 😉.

How do you follow WeasyPrint news?

A lot of our users follow us, mainly on GitHub. Don’t hesitate to follow us on Twitter and to subscribe to CourtBouillon’s RSS feed, so that you can’t miss anything when we have good news about our projects!

Do you have any comments?

A lot of comments are very supportive, we are really grateful for all your nice words…

Among the various remarks, adding or improving the support of some features (grid, flexbox, multicolumn, SVG…) seems to be the most important topic.

Finally, for the people interested in some advice to convince their company to support WeasyPrint: having a lot of companies giving a small amount of money is the best way to ensure that the project will be correctly maintained. Other tools exist, but they’re often more expensive. Having an open source library gives you the freedom to change it if needed, and not to be locked in with a specific vendor. And, of course, helping nice developers with a great community is a good way to make the world a better place 🌍 😻.

What’s Next

As you can imagine, the next features will be the support of Grid and footnotes. If everything goes well (it always does), this feature should be included with nice improvements of overall layout, including improved Flexbox support and long-awaited parallel flows.

Thanks a lot to our sponsors, who help us to improve WeasyPrint. We spend more and more time developing new features and fixing bugs, and we hope that we’ll be able to increase this time in the future.

Thanks a lot too to the people who support us, and to those who intend to do so. Don’t hesitate to contribute to our OpenCollective campaign, to get support and sponsoring logos.

Version 53 will be released before the end of the month, with a lot of new features. Try the latest beta version to be sure that everything will be fine for you!