WeasyPrint works really well for me. It can support all of the languages and fonts I need. I run it on AWS Lambda and in Docker as a web service.
I previously used WKHTMLTOPDF, but it hasn't been supported for years and doesn't support the latest CSS, etc. It does support JS if you need it, but I'd probably look at headless Chromium or another solution for JS if needed.
+1 to weasyprint; I have used weasyprint with a django production system for a few years now, and it works well enough that I never have to think about it. I'm not doing anything fancy, though, but for me it has worked well.
jmyeet
I’ve had excellent experience with Prince XML and poor experience with everything else I’ve tried. Prince is fast, robust and reliable.
Yes it costs money. So does developer time.
angst_ridden
Agreed. Prince also has a lot of good features for headers, footers, page numbering, etc, that make it very powerful.
There was a critical book that I read two years ago that is only available online. The web presentation is full of images of maps, artifacts, etc to help contextualize the content. No PDF converter tool has ever been up to the job of just extracting the text until this one. Thank you!
Semaphor
I'll join the choir. We use weasyprint for ebooks and invoices and it's a joy to use.
Massively new support for features over the last few years (partially thanks to some monetary sponsorships), it started pretty bare bones, and is now close to commercial solutions.
The maintainers are also very responsive, and helpful.
Amazing project
jiehong
Most website do not have a print CSS, so it doesn’t print that nicely in PDF.
But, I upvote weasyprint for that instead.
hulitu
> Most website do not have a print CSS, so it doesn’t print that nicely in PDF.
Can't they just render the screen content in a pdf ?
Seems easy for other programs to do this.
Wilduck
Viewport size and deciding where to paginate makes a naive approach to this surprisingly difficult. That being said, if you can control the css / html, you can often solve these problems with a short media query and some hints at where to break pages (e.g. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/break-after).
sureglymop
Prince XML looks nice but what about creating a PDF directly from a website? This often adds some problems, for example links still pointing to other pages on the web. But in my experience printing to PDF is often not good enough.
chinathrow
Yes, I did that for a recent small program. The @media print media query is powerful enough for most of the stuff I wanted to format nicely. Even page breaks are possible.
rcarmo
These two are the only right answers if you want a reliable, reproducible, relatively low resource experience. Running a browser engine has always been hard to maintain in the long run for me.
sodimel
+1 - Weasyprint is an excellent tool to make pdf from html content, and we're using it at work (with django) to export various documents.
bluebarbet
Seconded. In my eccentric workflow, I use Weasyprint to convert HTML emails to more portable PDFs. A surprisingly successful experiment.
hulitu
> Just print to PDF in a browser
I tried yesterday. With compliments to the moms of SWE who coded the functionality in firefox. Aparently puting the screen on a pdf page is an insurmontable task in 2025. (20 years ago was still doable). I had to make a screenshot and process the picture to print it.
kappadi3
Puppeteer and Playwright are the main open-source options nowadays, both solid for HTML → PDF once your print CSS is sorted.
Don’t forget proper page breaks (break-before/after/inside) — e.g. break-after: page works in Chromium, while always doesn’t. For trickier pagination you can look at Paged.js, and I’d test layouts in Chrome/Edge before automating.
Seconded. I went with C# + Playwright. I tried iTextSharp, iText, PDFSharp, and wkhtmltopdf, but they all had limitations. I had good results with Playwright in minutes, outside of tweaking the CSS like you mention.
I documented the process here[0] if anyone needs examples of the CSS and loading web fonts. Apologies for the article being long-winded – it was the first one I published.
Thirded, you can build this straight into your backend or into a microservice very easily.
You can also easily generate screenshots if that's more suitable than PDFs.
You can also easily use this to do stuff like jam a set of images into a HTML table and PDF or screenshot them in that format.
ChuckMcM
You made me realize that tractor feed roll paper would be really great for printed web pages, no page breaks! Kinda like reading scrolls of yore.
Aachen
Please don't turn nice formats into a format that's similar to screenshots of text. Pandoc has an option to pack all images and styles needed to render the page into one html file:
pandoc --self-contained input.html -o output.html
craftkiller
I was excited to try this today, but this is unusable. It absolutely mangles the page.
- It duplicated the headline, one in the correct place top-center but then a 2nd copy of the headline left-aligned below that.
- It shrunk the width of the content of the page (in fact, it seems to have completely discarded the css for the #content selector)
- It discarded the CSS for my code blocks, so now they are unreadable.
- My images are no longer center-aligned
- It added CSS that was not in the original document. For some reason, it addded hyphens: auto, overflow-wrap: break-word, text-rendering: optimizeLegibility, font-kerning: normal . None of those rules existed in the original document anywhere. Now my text is breaking mid-word with hyphens inserted.
- It pointlessly HTML-escaped some characters (like every quotation mark in every paragraph). This didn't break anything, but just... why?
Implementing the same functionality is like less than 100 lines of python, so I'm just going to go that route. I've implemented it once before, but it was for a previous company so I no longer have access to that code, but its like 1 afternoon of scripting and doesn't randomly destroy your documents. I don't know how pandoc got this so wrong.
For context: the document I am attempting to process has no javascript. It is a simple Emacs Org document (similar to markdown) rendered to HTML and then processed with pandoc. The only external content was a couple of images.
Aachen
Huh, that's a bummer! I only used it once myself to send colleagues draft versions of some markdown file that would later go on our blog, maybe it somehow helped that the source was markdown instead of html? Not sure, I'm sorry to hear of this disappointing experience :/
craftkiller
> maybe it somehow helped that the source was markdown instead of html?
That's probably it. Most of my issues were related to CSS, which markdown does not have[0]. The duplicated headline wasn't CSS though, that is by far the oddest issue. I'll probably file a bug report to pandoc after I replace all the text in this document with lorem ipsum (it is a document for work, so I can't share it publicly in its current form).
[0] unless you embedded your own CSS since markdown technically allows arbitrary HTML
crazygringo
Or, please do?
I use PDF's so I can send them to my iPad to read offline, highlight them, annotate them, and then send them back to my filesystem with highlights and annotations intact.
I sure can't do that with any "nice formats" like HTML or TXT or EPUB or MOBI.
nine_k
PDF is literally digital paper. HTML has logical structure, it can adapt to different displays, etc.
Sometimes you want one, sometimes, the other.
ratelimitsteve
>Sometimes you want one, sometimes, the other.
This is the part that the top commenter missed. Instead they decided that one format is "nice" and the other, by implication, isn't. I find PDFs a lot easier to keep organized en masse, I like that I can use them on any of my devices and it's easy for me to use them when I'm doing in-depth reading such as an ebook. Doubly so because my ereader also does text to speech and syncs across devices so I can read on my tablet while I'm on the exercise bike and then switch to listening to the same book on my phone with minimal seams and without losing my place. It is, in a word, nice.
Aachen
None of that sounds related to the format?
- A text to speech engine should work better with the original html structure where it sees bold tags, headings, and full sentences ra-
ther than broken-off ones
- Keeping PDFs organised, how would that differ from keeping any other filetype organised? I don't understand what difference you, "by implication", attribute to a file ending in .html or .pdf for being able to handle them en masse. If anything, searching across them will be vastly easier for software (self-written or third-party) and more reliable because it's all plain text
- Text and audio rendering syncing, I have no experience with but that doesn't sound like it ought to fundamentally work for a display format and not for the source text format. Of course, the software has to have support for this format (and otherwise it's trivial to pdfify a html but vice versa is nearly impossible)
When do want the digital paper when you can have the more flexible one?
jerjerjer
When I want it to be displayed in the exact same way everywhere.
crazygringo
Did you not read my reply to your root comment? I already answered this for you.
Each one has things the other can't do. Neither is universally more flexible.
mr_mitm
You could, though. What you are describing are features of an editor, not a file format. I can imagine a browser addon performing the same tasks.
circuit10
But in this case the flexibility of HTML is a negative because any layout shift would mess up the positions of the annotations, so fixing the layout (and making sure it’s non-interactive) is helpful here
whenc
PDF annotations sit within the file.
mr_mitm
I know, even though that depends on the editor. Okular for example places them in an extra file, last I checked. That's not unique to PDFs. HTML files are modifiable. There is nothing preventing an editor to put annotations in it as well.
I noticed when trying it out for this comment, but then looked around when it was introduced and it seems recent (as in, an LTS distribution won't have it). Someone on stackoverflow said they get "unknown option --embed-resources". The old option will work for everyone and is also simpler, one instead of two parameters. People whose client supports the new option will see the upgrade suggestion when they run this. In the end I saw mainly downsides to mentioning the new rather than the old way
agedclock
Pandoc would be my preferred tool. It is excellent at converting between other formats as well.
kelnos
> Please don't turn nice formats into a format that's similar to screenshots of text
Converting HTML to PDF shouldn't result in an image wrapped in a PDF. Text will be preserved as text in the final PDF. (Unless the converter is garbage, of course.)
Aachen
If you've ever copied text out of a PDF, you'll know it's not the original text anymore. Besides ligatures, you get broken sentences with extra hyphens inserted in wrong places (that were word/line breaks in the PDF-rendered version), if it'll properly let you select more than a few words at all. It works like "put these couple words at position x,y" and not (html's) semantic "here comes a heading" tag that helps people accessibly read your text, and if you're not suffering from any impairment or mobile devices with narrower screens than this particular render was designed for, it also lets you work with the document more easily. It's like you remove all HTML and keep only the CSS: all definitions of what's a section, sentence, emphasis, or caption are gone
I didn't mean literally an image, hence saying image-like. You get similar limitations to when using OCR, which seems very image-like to me
layer8
HTML+CSS+media files isn’t a nice format, and much less portable through time and space than PDF.
Aachen
Not sure if I'm misreading your comment, but it's not plural files with all those formats separately
That's what the "self contained" option does: turn it into one nice file. Makes no difference if you copy example.pdf or example.html when both contain all images and styles (except one of them also contains the original semantic text)
TylerE
Being (not so easily) edited is often a feature, not a bug.
craftkiller
If that is your goal, you should be cryptographically signing your documents with your PGP key. That way you actually have assurance the document has not been modified rather than just hoping someone hasn't modified the document. Additionally, PGP can sign anything so you are open to use whatever format you want.
Aachen
May I recommend .html in that case? You can embed scripts that control who can run it, having it fetch a decryption token from a server or require a decryption password with a safe password hashing algorithm of your choice
It's much more versatile than PDF and, if the algorithm decides the user is allowed to read the document, then the user gets to make use of all of the document's options like a better search function (PDF can't find words that are bro-
ken across lines because that information of what's a word is gone, transformed into coordinates of what characters need to go where). It's also much more readable on different screen sizes, as the user can resize the window to whatever is comfortable on a 27" screen, or fits on their pocket e-reader. You can even draw it on a canvas if you want to prevent people from extracting the decrypted strings (though it's evil, you have that option). There's only benefits!
PDF is the lazy way to half-ass a read-only document while screwing, ahem, making anyone using a mobile phone zoom, pan, and squint. Thankfully, phones are falling out of fash— wait, scratch that, I just heard text reflow is more relevant than ever as phone use continues to soar
ryandrake
Is this really that much of a motivation in 2025? Maybe in 2000 you could publish a PDF with the assurance that only the people who paid for Acrobat would be able to edit it, but today, there are a lot of accessible ways to edit PDFs, I don't think I'd choose PDF if I for whatever reason wanted to limit others from editing.
guywithahat
I was thinking this too, PDF's exist so people don't mess with the document. That said, it's still a clever feature, and pandoc can convert html into a pdf as well with a conversion engine. That said, I suspect it'll fail on anything sufficiently complex
- caveat 1: this is (or was) a more or less undocumented function and a few years ago it just disappeared only to come back in a later release.
- caveat 2: even though you can convert local files it does require internet access as any references to icons, style sheets, fonts and tracker pixels cause Firefox to attempt to retrieve them without any (sensible) timeout. So, running this on a server without internet access will make the process hang forever.
jlokier
Last time I explored this, Firefox rendered thin lines in subtly bordered tables as thick lines, so I had to use Chromium. But back then Chrome did worse at pagination than Firefox.
So I used Firefox for multi-page documents and Chromium for single-page invoices.
I spent a lot of time with different versions of both browsers, and numerous quirks made a very unpleasant experience.
Eventually I settled on Chromium (Ungoogled), which I use nowadays for invoices.
nine_k
Why, Firefox has a headless mode. It can't just print a document via a simple CLI command, you have to go for Selenium (or maybe Playwright, I did not try it in that capacity). Foxdriver would work, but its development ceased.
lizimo
If generating PDF dynamically is what you really care about, consider Typst. https://typst.app/
We use it in production to generate reports, and it is amazing.
Shortcutting much of the discussion here (what are you goals / why would you do that / don't use format X): a key problem is that neither HTML (as published on today's Web) nor PDF are reliable as canonical document formats. Tagged-markup such as Markdown (or otherlightweight markup languages) or LaTeX (or other heavy markup languages) are far more robust. Markdown has its variants, but all are pretty simple and easy to produce. LaTeX is slightly more complex, but remains quite straightforward for simple works.
Once you've got an appropriate canonical version in any of these options, you have an embarassment of riches to convert to any given document format (what I call endpoints) you'd care for: PDF, HTML, RTF, DOCX, or many, many others. I generally reach for Pandoc first, which itself, yes, of course, often relies on additional tools/libraries to parse or generate endpoints, but is quite versatile.
You can simplify the intake of HTML by stripping out cruft. Readability, Beautiful Soup, or other HTML filtering tools can target the core content and metadata you most likely want.
Otherwise, think through what you're doing and why to more narrowly define your goals and tools. E.g., if you want a faithful printed representation of a mainstream-browser-rendered page (that is, Google Chrome), you'd probably do best to use its print-to-PDF options (mentioned several times here). If you want to extract core text, filtering out much of today's WWW cruft will be a high priority.
RiverCrochet
If you don't really need the PDF but just want to archive pages, SingleFile is better. It'll capture the entire page to a single HTML file and I find this is better than the PDF if I don't want to print it. It's a browser extension, but there's also a command line version (https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/single-file-cli) that uses Chrome or Chromium's headless mode.
trollbridge
I wrote a solution in 2010 that used headless Firefox with some plugins to generate a PDF and then had the graphic designer write print CSSes. It was driven by Perl and was a convenient way for non-programmers to design forms.
Unfortunately, that server and software stack is still around and still in production.
znpy
> Unfortunately, that server and software stack is still around and still in production.
that means you did a good job.
Dwedit
2010-era Firefox is probably plagued by security holes.
detaro
If your print-file generation code tries to exploit the headless browser you use to turn its outputs into PDF something has gone very wrong already.
trollbridge
My biggest concern would be the Perl libraries I used to sanitise the input. I checked and none of them have any CVEs, though.
thangalin
Is this an xy problem? If you have the original document (in Markdown), one possibility would be to use my software, KeenWrite[1], to convert Markdown to XHTML then typeset XHTML to PDF via ConTeXt. See the user manual[2] for an example of a Markdown document typeset in this fashion, along with usage instructions.
If you only have HTML to work with, you can also use Flying Saucer[3], which is what KeenWrite uses to preview Markdown documents when rendered as HTML. Flying Saucer uses an open-source version of iText[4] to produce PDF documents (from HTML source docs).
We use this in production and it's very stable. It also supports background gradients which we wanted to use so badly :-) Can recommend
roxolotl
Would second this. I’ve used it in production to generate tens of thousands of PDFs a day. It just works. Run the docker container throw html and variables at it and get PDFs back.
Ghostscript. Depending on specific needs it may be much more turnkey than Pandoc, which isn’t actually doing much directly with things other than intermediating, iiuc. (LaTex) does the heavy lifting.
Ghost script is working with postscript natively and will likely manage idiosyncrasies of web content better. It’s got a decent ecosystem, command line, you can find gui’s if that’s your thing (no judgement, your lifestyle is none of my business).
Many other good tools mentioned here as well, but if your asking because you need more, or fine grained (near infinite) control over the pdf composition, there’s nothing OSS I can think of that approaches its capabilities.
I have Chromium shoved into an AWS Lambda Layer, when we need HTML to PDF conversion we shove it off onto that. It loads the HTML into Chromium then "prints" it to PDF.
dvcoolarun
I built this: https://github.com/dvcoolarun/web2pdf
— a CLI tool for converting web pages to PDFs, recently open-sourced after adding several new features. (Might be useful!)
Not related to the thread, but if anyone is looking to hire a developer or knows of opportunities, I was recently let go and am actively searching. Any leads or feedback would be greatly appreciated.
My main use for that is printing appointment information, tickets, and product listings. The product listings are useful when trying to find in a store something that's supposedly available and in stock. Usually, only the first page is useful. There will be additional useless pages of irrelevant items, deals, and ads.
Koffiepoeder
If you want lots of differently styled templates, template management and editing/styling capabilites in word or excel (ie. you can just ask your customer/employer/.. to make an example document), I can really recommend Carbone [0]. I've been a happy customer for a few years now. Extra advantage is also that it also offers you excel outout generation as well, which is also often a requirement in applications. They have a SaaS offering as well if you'd like. They are open source though, so you can easily run a docker container!
Yeah, wkhtmltopdf can be a pain, especially with modern CSS/JS-heavy pages. One option you could try is PDFBolt - you can design a template in HTML/CSS once, then simply pass the JSON data and template ID. It handles dynamic content and modern layouts without all the quirks of wkhtmltopdf. You can also convert HTML content or URLs to PDFs.
mightjustwork
https://gotenberg.dev/
...has been working well for me for the last few years. It's a headless instance of Google Chrome with a golang wrapper. Runs well in Docker or a cloud instance.
zikani_03
Seconding.. gotenberg has been solid for us. We also make use of it's convert from Word to PDF feature and it's been really solid.
hansonkd
gotenberg is really rock solid for us. Easy to deploy as a docker container to any infrastructure.
hhthrowaway1230OP
5k pdfs a month for archival purposes, must be pdf, customers demand this
haft
A reverse of this question; what is the best way to convert pdf to html? We are required by accessibility law to make our PDFs WCAG compliant however it would be easier to convert these to HTML.
This is really cool, so thanks for sharing. Since the motivating goal for the question you are answering is WCAG compliance, is the output of pdf2htmlex meaningfully more WCAG compliant?
I am currently writing a WASM-ready PDF toolkit that can handle both HTML to PDF and then rendering PDF pages to SVG. However, it's not yet production-ready.
The underlying HTML engine is currently a severe "work in progress", but it gives me the low-level access that I need: https://azul.rs/reftest
dredmorbius
This reduces to parsing PDFs, which is an unsolved hard problem.
At low volumes, my preferred approach is to select and extract text (copy/paste, perhaps using the poppler library for larger-scale work), dump that to plain-text and convert that (manually / scripted) to Markdown. From there you can get to PDF or pretty much any other format through tools such as pandoc.
haft
A revers of this question; what is the best way to convert pdf to html? We are required by accessibility law to make our PDFs WCAG compliant however it would be easier to convert these to HTML.
freedomben
I'd love to go the other way: convert a PDF into a self contained HTML page that renders properly in a browser. It's been way harder than I thought it would. Any advice?
drabbiticus
> renders properly
Depending on your requirements on both PDF input and HTML output, there is often no way to do this that is both easy and general. At it's core, PDFs are not designed to be universally reflowable.
mr_mitm
You could embed it as a base64 blob, embed PDF.js (which is included by browsers anyway, I think) and use that to render it in the HTML. But I realize you probably meant a static HTML without JavaScript.
freedomben
Yes ideally, but even this is helpful, thank you!
gucci-on-fleek
You can use dvisvgm, pdftocairo, or Inkscape to convert PDF to SVG, which you can either use directly or insert inline into an HTML document.
It only handles like 5% of HTML, but it's the 5% I was using.
I've also had success producing PDFs with GhostScript from a PostScript file. PostScript is really easy to write, almost like SVG.
freeopinion
Clearly,a million people have tried to find an answer for this question. I've tried. At least one of my attempts was an XY problem. I was converting generated HTML that would never see a browser. It was never intended to see a browser. The people generating it were very good at HTML/CSS/JS, but didn't know how to produce the same content outside HTML.
busymom0
If you are able to do this on a Mac, you can load the html in a WKWebView and then use the function:
The last time I had to do this I scripted a back-end that scaled up headless chrome browsers to render web pages to PDF. I think it was using Puppeteer, but was a few years ago. (FWIW the decision I think was mostly driven by the environment, I think there are other options.)
bob1029
If your HTML is simply an intermediary to get you to a PDF, you could consider just skipping straight to building the PDF directly:
This would be far more efficient than spinning up an entire browser and printing PDFs to disk.
deaddodo
Building PDF directly (unless you're creating documents, especially fillables) is non-intuitive. Most PDFs are people trying to capture live data in a cached manner. If not, using a preliminary format like Markdown/HTML/LaTeX/DocX/etc to generate your PDF is almost always more intuitive.
stared
What's your goal?
Print it? Archivize it? Send it via email? Read it on another device (which)?
Depending on that, there are different solutions and trade-offs. For example on how to deal with pagination.
To reinforce this: pandoc has been the go-to for a long, long time and they have encountered and addressed tons of issues, which is especially important for two underspecified and over-provisioned formats like HTML and pdf.
Go through the revision and bug history to see a sample of issues you're avoiding by using a highly-trafficked, well-supported solution.
The only reason not to use it is when they say they don't support a given feature that you need; and the nice thing there is that they'll usually say it, and have a good reason why.
The other reason to use pandoc is that while you might currently want PDF as your outbound format, you might end up preferring some other format (structured logically instead of by layout); with pandoc that change would be easy.
Finally, pandoc is extensible. If you do find that you want different output in some respect, you can easily write an plugin (in python or haskel or ...) to make exactly the tweak you need.
hhthrowaway1230OP
doesn't pandoc rely on some engine itself?
cpach
Yep, you need something like XeTeX in order to render the PDF.
brudgers
Curious why that matters to you?
I mean everything has dependencies (some of the solutions elsewhere require Chrome and other common solutions require the JVM). At least Pandoc is GPL.
kakokiyrvoooo
It matters because pandoc is not rendering the website to pdf, it converts the html to latex and then uses a latex engine to render the pdf.
brudgers
Forgive me but I don’t understand why that matters to you and am trying to understand what the issue with Latex is.
Because lots of things work this way. For example compilers built on LLV uses an intermediate language and Python uses byte code.
I suspect some html to pdf tools go through postScript.
kreetx
There are multiple ways to "depend", so if pandoc executes some external tool all of the work then might as well use that external tool directly. You will get more control over how the conversion happens, know for what search for when in trouble etc.
brudgers
My understanding and experience is that Latex has a significant learning curve and Pandoc provides a more gentle front end.
Of course Latex gives you fine control to hand tune the engine…but that doesn’t seem like what the OP is looking for.
My website's content is xml, and I use Apache Fop to turn it into a PDF with page numbers and other nice things. It works nicely, but takes some setup.
deafpolygon
Pandoc or use a browser to save as pdf
estimator7292
IIRC LibreOffice has some command line tools to do all kinds of document conversion
handzhiev
I'm surprised no one mentioned mPDF. Maybe php isn't very popular here :)
ftchd
the only thing I found to work reliably well is simply Chromium's print feature
crsr
Browserless have browsers as a service, and a dedicated pdf endpoint[0] you can call. Had really good experience with this.
openhtmltopdf is what we're using. Some outdated versions.
supersaw
Been using this as well. It's worth noting that while the original project appears to have been abandoned, it has since been forked and is currently maintained here: https://github.com/openhtmltopdf/openhtmltopdf
Been looking at this one. I inherited a project and I set it up to use puppeteer and chrome server side to generate a PDF from HTML but it's too much overhead. I want to do this all on the frontend because it should be simple enough to do and can use less resources on the server.
gangtao
I use chrome and ctrl+P
carlosjobim
Orion browser and export to PDF function. It will export the page exactly as it looks, including the page dimension.
efnx
pandoc
syngrog66
pandoc
etyhhgfff(dead)
[dead]
pentium166
wkhtmltopdf is pretty out of date at this point and headless Chrome/Chromium or something that wraps them is probably a better and safer, roughly equivalent, alternative. Docker might not be a great option if you're already running a containerized service and don't want to deal with getting them to play nice together.
lovelydata(dead)
[dead]
journal
if you are doing html to pdf, you might also need the ability to merge. a few more features and you're better of with a commercial solution.
crazygringo
Merge what?
pentium166
I assume combining 2+ documents. For example, attaching a cover page with document owner/version control/lifecycle information to an existing PDF.
crazygringo
That's the easiest thing in the world with free software.
One way is to install poppler-utils and use pdfunite. There are many other open-source packages you can use as well.
fogzen
Don’t. Show a web page and open the print dialog, and tell people to save as PDF. All major browsers support this, and the browser HTML to PDF code is the most robust and accurate.
crazygringo
There's nothing in OP's question that suggests this is a one-off operation in response to a user action.
It's very likely to be a massive batch operation of a ton of HTML files that might not even be their own site.
hhthrowaway1230OP
this is the case indeed
chibbell
That does make sense where possible. I do feel like OPs question is super relevant if you are doing anything where the PDF has to be rendered server side, like say as part of a larger data process when producing an exportable report in PDF format.
https://weasyprint.org/
For a proprietary solution, try Prince XML:
https://www.princexml.com/
I previously used WKHTMLTOPDF, but it hasn't been supported for years and doesn't support the latest CSS, etc. It does support JS if you need it, but I'd probably look at headless Chromium or another solution for JS if needed.
Edit: Previous post with some good discussion: https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=26578826
Yes it costs money. So does developer time.
The maintainers are also very responsive, and helpful.
Amazing project
But, I upvote weasyprint for that instead.
Can't they just render the screen content in a pdf ? Seems easy for other programs to do this.
I tried yesterday. With compliments to the moms of SWE who coded the functionality in firefox. Aparently puting the screen on a pdf page is an insurmontable task in 2025. (20 years ago was still doable). I had to make a screenshot and process the picture to print it.
Shameless plug: I run yakpdf.com, a hosted Puppeteer-based service if you want to avoid self-hosting. https://rapidapi.com/yakpdf-yakpdf/api/yakpdf
I documented the process here[0] if anyone needs examples of the CSS and loading web fonts. Apologies for the article being long-winded – it was the first one I published.
[0] https://johnh.co/blog/creating-pdfs-from-html-using-csharp
You can also easily generate screenshots if that's more suitable than PDFs.
You can also easily use this to do stuff like jam a set of images into a HTML table and PDF or screenshot them in that format.
For context: the document I am attempting to process has no javascript. It is a simple Emacs Org document (similar to markdown) rendered to HTML and then processed with pandoc. The only external content was a couple of images.
That's probably it. Most of my issues were related to CSS, which markdown does not have[0]. The duplicated headline wasn't CSS though, that is by far the oddest issue. I'll probably file a bug report to pandoc after I replace all the text in this document with lorem ipsum (it is a document for work, so I can't share it publicly in its current form).
[0] unless you embedded your own CSS since markdown technically allows arbitrary HTML
I use PDF's so I can send them to my iPad to read offline, highlight them, annotate them, and then send them back to my filesystem with highlights and annotations intact.
I sure can't do that with any "nice formats" like HTML or TXT or EPUB or MOBI.
Sometimes you want one, sometimes, the other.
This is the part that the top commenter missed. Instead they decided that one format is "nice" and the other, by implication, isn't. I find PDFs a lot easier to keep organized en masse, I like that I can use them on any of my devices and it's easy for me to use them when I'm doing in-depth reading such as an ebook. Doubly so because my ereader also does text to speech and syncs across devices so I can read on my tablet while I'm on the exercise bike and then switch to listening to the same book on my phone with minimal seams and without losing my place. It is, in a word, nice.
- A text to speech engine should work better with the original html structure where it sees bold tags, headings, and full sentences ra-
ther than broken-off ones
- Keeping PDFs organised, how would that differ from keeping any other filetype organised? I don't understand what difference you, "by implication", attribute to a file ending in .html or .pdf for being able to handle them en masse. If anything, searching across them will be vastly easier for software (self-written or third-party) and more reliable because it's all plain text
- Text and audio rendering syncing, I have no experience with but that doesn't sound like it ought to fundamentally work for a display format and not for the source text format. Of course, the software has to have support for this format (and otherwise it's trivial to pdfify a html but vice versa is nearly impossible)
Each one has things the other can't do. Neither is universally more flexible.
https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#:~:text=Deprecated%20synonym%...
Converting HTML to PDF shouldn't result in an image wrapped in a PDF. Text will be preserved as text in the final PDF. (Unless the converter is garbage, of course.)
I didn't mean literally an image, hence saying image-like. You get similar limitations to when using OCR, which seems very image-like to me
That's what the "self contained" option does: turn it into one nice file. Makes no difference if you copy example.pdf or example.html when both contain all images and styles (except one of them also contains the original semantic text)
It's much more versatile than PDF and, if the algorithm decides the user is allowed to read the document, then the user gets to make use of all of the document's options like a better search function (PDF can't find words that are bro-
ken across lines because that information of what's a word is gone, transformed into coordinates of what characters need to go where). It's also much more readable on different screen sizes, as the user can resize the window to whatever is comfortable on a 27" screen, or fits on their pocket e-reader. You can even draw it on a canvas if you want to prevent people from extracting the decrypted strings (though it's evil, you have that option). There's only benefits!
PDF is the lazy way to half-ass a read-only document while screwing, ahem, making anyone using a mobile phone zoom, pan, and squint. Thankfully, phones are falling out of fash— wait, scratch that, I just heard text reflow is more relevant than ever as phone use continues to soar
pandoc input.html -o output.pdf --pdf-engine=<your engine>
ended up using headless chrome specifically to make sure javascript things rendered properly
Edit: it appears so- https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=15131840
with an elaborate script that relies on xdotool
/path/to/firefox --window-size 1700 --headless -screenshot myfile.png file://myfile.html
Easy, right ?
Used this for many years... but beware:
- caveat 1: this is (or was) a more or less undocumented function and a few years ago it just disappeared only to come back in a later release.
- caveat 2: even though you can convert local files it does require internet access as any references to icons, style sheets, fonts and tracker pixels cause Firefox to attempt to retrieve them without any (sensible) timeout. So, running this on a server without internet access will make the process hang forever.
So I used Firefox for multi-page documents and Chromium for single-page invoices.
I spent a lot of time with different versions of both browsers, and numerous quirks made a very unpleasant experience.
Eventually I settled on Chromium (Ungoogled), which I use nowadays for invoices.
Once you've got an appropriate canonical version in any of these options, you have an embarassment of riches to convert to any given document format (what I call endpoints) you'd care for: PDF, HTML, RTF, DOCX, or many, many others. I generally reach for Pandoc first, which itself, yes, of course, often relies on additional tools/libraries to parse or generate endpoints, but is quite versatile.
You can simplify the intake of HTML by stripping out cruft. Readability, Beautiful Soup, or other HTML filtering tools can target the core content and metadata you most likely want.
Otherwise, think through what you're doing and why to more narrowly define your goals and tools. E.g., if you want a faithful printed representation of a mainstream-browser-rendered page (that is, Google Chrome), you'd probably do best to use its print-to-PDF options (mentioned several times here). If you want to extract core text, filtering out much of today's WWW cruft will be a high priority.
Unfortunately, that server and software stack is still around and still in production.
that means you did a good job.
If you only have HTML to work with, you can also use Flying Saucer[3], which is what KeenWrite uses to preview Markdown documents when rendered as HTML. Flying Saucer uses an open-source version of iText[4] to produce PDF documents (from HTML source docs).
Another possibility is to use pandoc and LaTeX.
[1]: https://keenwrite.com/
[2]: https://keenwrite.com/docs/user-manual.pdf
[3]: https://github.com/flyingsaucerproject/flyingsaucer
[4]: https://itextpdf.com/
Ghost script is working with postscript natively and will likely manage idiosyncrasies of web content better. It’s got a decent ecosystem, command line, you can find gui’s if that’s your thing (no judgement, your lifestyle is none of my business).
Many other good tools mentioned here as well, but if your asking because you need more, or fine grained (near infinite) control over the pdf composition, there’s nothing OSS I can think of that approaches its capabilities.
https://ghostscript.com/
Not related to the thread, but if anyone is looking to hire a developer or knows of opportunities, I was recently let go and am actively searching. Any leads or feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Sample PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1n7M1TKOptSsYiibrbvV_Yojx53T...
My main use for that is printing appointment information, tickets, and product listings. The product listings are useful when trying to find in a store something that's supposedly available and in stock. Usually, only the first page is useful. There will be additional useless pages of irrelevant items, deals, and ads.
[0]: https://carbone.io/
I am currently writing a WASM-ready PDF toolkit that can handle both HTML to PDF and then rendering PDF pages to SVG. However, it's not yet production-ready.
The underlying HTML engine is currently a severe "work in progress", but it gives me the low-level access that I need: https://azul.rs/reftest
At low volumes, my preferred approach is to select and extract text (copy/paste, perhaps using the poppler library for larger-scale work), dump that to plain-text and convert that (manually / scripted) to Markdown. From there you can get to PDF or pretty much any other format through tools such as pandoc.
Depending on your requirements on both PDF input and HTML output, there is often no way to do this that is both easy and general. At it's core, PDFs are not designed to be universally reflowable.
It only handles like 5% of HTML, but it's the 5% I was using.
I've also had success producing PDFs with GhostScript from a PostScript file. PostScript is really easy to write, almost like SVG.
createPDF(configuration:completionHandler:)
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/wkwebview/c...:)
https://pdfbox.apache.org
This would be far more efficient than spinning up an entire browser and printing PDFs to disk.
Print it? Archivize it? Send it via email? Read it on another device (which)?
Depending on that, there are different solutions and trade-offs. For example on how to deal with pagination.
[0] https://github.com/westy92/html-pdf-chrome/
Go through the revision and bug history to see a sample of issues you're avoiding by using a highly-trafficked, well-supported solution.
The only reason not to use it is when they say they don't support a given feature that you need; and the nice thing there is that they'll usually say it, and have a good reason why.
The other reason to use pandoc is that while you might currently want PDF as your outbound format, you might end up preferring some other format (structured logically instead of by layout); with pandoc that change would be easy.
Finally, pandoc is extensible. If you do find that you want different output in some respect, you can easily write an plugin (in python or haskel or ...) to make exactly the tweak you need.
I mean everything has dependencies (some of the solutions elsewhere require Chrome and other common solutions require the JVM). At least Pandoc is GPL.
Because lots of things work this way. For example compilers built on LLV uses an intermediate language and Python uses byte code.
I suspect some html to pdf tools go through postScript.
Of course Latex gives you fine control to hand tune the engine…but that doesn’t seem like what the OP is looking for.
```
pandoc input.html -t typst -o output.typ
typst compile output.typ output.pdf
```
[0] http://docs.browserless.io/rest-apis/pdf-api
One way is to install poppler-utils and use pdfunite. There are many other open-source packages you can use as well.
It's very likely to be a massive batch operation of a ton of HTML files that might not even be their own site.