I've seen multiple questions that are very similar to this one, so I was hesitant at first to post it. But nothing suggested resolved my issue and I can't seem to figure out what's wrong myself.
For a project I made for one client they wanted to ability to convert quotes for their customers (generated using an online form) to PDFs. Simple enough. As the entire project was in PHP, I used the following simple process:
This worked until they changed servers. The new server has a firewall.
At first the PDF conversion step was returning a firewall page saying that the server couldn't make outbound connections. To resolve this I fed the HTML file directly instead of linking to it (/var/www/mysite/temp/18382.html instead of www.example.com/temp/18382.html). This converted the HTML, but the firewall prevented the loading of CSS and images
I can overcome the CSS by simply embedding it directly in the site instead of linking to it (using the <style> tags), but this doesn't work for images
I tried using relative links first. I changed <img src="http://www.example.com/temp/image.jpg" /> to <img src="./image.jpg" />. This didn't work.
Next I tried <img src="file:///var/www/mysite/temp/image.jpg" /> but this didn't work, either
I read around and look through the WkHTMLtoPDF manual and I tried several different command line arguments like --enable-local-file-access, --enable /var/www/mysite/temp/, and --images but nothing seems to fix it
If you're on Linux, check the ownership of your images. For Windows, you will find some info on http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/wiki/Usage.
I tried different kind of paths to the image:
<img src="file:///var/www/testpdf/flowers.jpg"><img src="./flowers.jpg"><img src="flowers.jpg"><img src="/var/www/testpdf/flowers.jpg">All images are shown correctly. I didn't use any command line arguments
(only wkhtmltopdf /var/www/testpdf/makepdf.html makepdf.pdf)