That limitation aside, it offers more advanced PDF options than Headless Chrome and is probably the closest open-source alternative to DocRaptor (except we support JavaScript!). It has one major limitation though: it does not support JavaScript. We haven’t used it, but it’s generally well-reviewed. Weasyprint is a very popular HTML-to-PDF library that is not based on an actual browser. Not all libraries are based on browser engines. Stick with the Headless Chrome-based libraries. Additionally, PhantomJS has been officially abandoned by its maintainer. They are buggy, lack support for modern CSS, have poor font support, and are a pain to install. Historically, wkhtmltopdf and PhantomJS were the primary open-source HTML to PDF libraries. There’s a bunch now, but the most popular Headless Chrome libraries include Puppeteer, electron-pdf, and Athena. It provides modern CSS and JavaScript support and a strong developer community. We’d recommend HTML to PDF libraries based on Headless Chrome. You submit an HTML document or URL and you get a PDF back. They each have different advantages and disadvantages.Īs you normally write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for web browsers, browser-based libraries are the easiest for web developers to use. There are two kinds of open source tools: browser-based and.others.
You should review all your potential solutions. That said, many DocRaptor users have tried an open-source tool before switching to DocRaptor. We thought we could help other developers from wasting time and energy as we did. In the end, our own difficulties with creating a high-quality PDF and scaling production led us to create DocRaptor. If you want to generate a lot of documents or support simultaneous PDF creation, scalability planning will be required. If your usage numbers are small, this may not be a concern. Background jobs are the common solution (it's what we do). If it crashes, it will restart automatically.Īs of this writing, headless Chrome uses about 65mb of RAM while idle. It's suggested to use pm2 to ensure Chrome continues to run. There is significant overhead starting up Chrome for each PDF generation which can be easily avoided. Note: It is strongly recommended that you keep Chrome running side-by-side with Node.js. A popular Node-based open-source HTML to PDF library notes in the readme: There is also larger startup times, CPU usage, and memory consumption to consider.
#CSS TRICKS HTML TO PDF CONVERTER HOW TO#
Learn how to adjust styling with basic HTML and CSS. With enough effort and polyfills, slightly more complex documents can be supported but we always recommend testing the most complex elements of your document first.Ĭonsistency and clarity for PDF and Excel documents can be yours with DocRaptor. They’re great for one-page invoices, simple letters, or exact copies of existing webpages. If you don’t need any of that functionality, the open-source tools may be a good solution for your document. Tables or images spanning multiple pages.This one fact, along with a dedicated focus on PDFs, means Prince’s commercial HTML to PDF engine has far superior support for common requirements such as: When there isn't even a concept of a “page”, repeating elements such as headers or watermarks aren’t supported. So why did we build the DocRaptor HTML-to-PDF API on top of the PrinceXML commercial engine? After struggling with weeks with open-source libraries, we realized there is a significant technical gap between Prince and all the browser-based HTML-to-PDF libraries:īrowsers assume you’re making a long scrolling webpage.
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