I’m working on building an admin panel that needs a feature to download reports as PDF files. I’ve been trying to use various HTML-to-PDF libraries but keep running into issues. The output always looks weird or broken compared to what you see in the browser.
It’s crazy how browser plugins can capture perfect screenshots and PDFs of entire pages, but when you try to do the same thing programmatically with JavaScript libraries, everything falls apart. The formatting gets messed up, images don’t load right, and CSS styling breaks.
The only reliable solution seems to be using headless browser services, but those cost money and you have to send your private data to external APIs. Has anyone found a better way to handle this?
browser rendering is def better than any lib out there. i switched from Puppeteer to Playwright and it’s so much better for complex layouts. just add a delay before you gen the pdf to make sure everything loads up. kinda annoying but for perfect render, it’s worth it.
Been through this hell countless times. What finally worked: ditch client-side JavaScript and generate PDFs server-side with something like wkhtmltopdf. Here’s the thing - most HTML-to-PDF libraries choke on modern CSS frameworks and external resources. I create a separate, stripped-down template just for PDFs. Inline CSS, base64 images, super basic HTML. Yeah, it’s more work upfront, but it kills 90% of the rendering problems. Don’t try converting your actual web page - build a clean, PDF-friendly template instead. Takes longer to set up but you’ll save hours debugging weird formatting crap.
Had this exact problem for months before I switched to Puppeteer locally. Yeah, it adds server overhead, but it crushes every HTML-to-PDF converter I’ve tried. Run it in Docker to keep things isolated and dodge the headless Chrome security issues. The game-changer: inline all your CSS and optimize images before sending to Puppeteer. Kills most rendering problems you’re hitting. I built a separate PDF microservice for production - been bulletproof for over a year.