For a proprietary solution, try Prince XML:
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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26578826
Yes it costs money. So does developer time.
The maintainers are also very responsive, and helpful.
Amazing project
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.
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.
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.
pandoc --self-contained input.html -o output.htmlI 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.
- 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?
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.
--embed-resources --standalone.
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://news.ycombinator.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.
[2]: https://keenwrite.com/docs/user-manual.pdf
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.
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.
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...
[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://gotenberg.dev/docs/routes
We use it in production for pdf exports and reports generation.
Just spin up a docker container and use a client library or REST API to send html data.
This would be far more efficient than spinning up an entire browser and printing PDFs to disk.
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.
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.
```
pandoc input.html -t typst -o output.typ
typst compile output.typ output.pdf
```
It's very likely to be a massive batch operation of a ton of HTML files that might not even be their own site.