I'm using wkhtmltopdf but it is painful to work with? what are other people using nowadays? i.e canva or other tools?

Just print to PDF in a browser, or automate that using a browser automation tool. For a non-browser-based open source solution, WeasyPrint.

https://weasyprint.org/

For a proprietary solution, try Prince XML:

https://www.princexml.com/

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.

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

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.

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

chrome --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf https://example.com

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.

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.

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.

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).

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/

https://gotenberg.dev

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.

Sample PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1n7M1TKOptSsYiibrbvV_Yojx53T...

https://github.com/plutoprint/plutobook was a recent Show HN and looks excellent

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.

https://ghostscript.com/

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.

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.

Print to PDF in the browser?

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.

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!

[0]: https://carbone.io/

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.

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.

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.

5k pdfs a month for archival purposes, must be pdf, customers demand this

I just wrote a quick HTML renderer in Python with ReportLab: https://GitHub.com/kragen/dercuano/blob/master/genpdf.py

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.

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.

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.

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?

Puppeteer (Pdfium => https://github.com/chromium/pdfium)

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.)

If your HTML is simply an intermediary to get you to a PDF, you could consider just skipping straight to building the PDF directly:

https://pdfbox.apache.org

This would be far more efficient than spinning up an entire browser and printing PDFs to disk.

I've had decent results with html-pdf-chrome[0], which automates printing to PDF from Chromium or Chrome.

[0] https://github.com/westy92/html-pdf-chrome/

I would use pandoc and convert to pdf using typst:

```

pandoc input.html -t typst -o output.typ

typst compile output.typ output.pdf

```

pandoc

I run chromium on my server and render the PDF from there using puppeteer.

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.

Open the html file in firefox and `ctrl + p`

IIRC LibreOffice has some command line tools to do all kinds of document conversion

I'm surprised no one mentioned mPDF. Maybe php isn't very popular here :)

Browserless have browsers as a service, and a dedicated pdf endpoint[0] you can call. Had really good experience with this.

[0] http://docs.browserless.io/rest-apis/pdf-api

the only thing I found to work reliably well is simply Chromium's print feature

pandoc is your friend.

jsPDF is a work of art https://parall.ax/products/jspdf

openhtmltopdf is what we're using. Some outdated versions.

I use chrome and ctrl+P

If you are able to do this on a Mac, you can load the html in a WKWebView and then use the function:

createPDF(configuration:completionHandler:)

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/wkwebview/c...:)

OpenPDF for Java https://github.com/LibrePDF/OpenPDF

pandoc

pandoc

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.

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.