PDF generation without Chromium dependency

Is generating PDFs on the server strictly required? I always generate PDFs on the client side when possible. The two main reasons are:

1. I don’t waste CPU cycles and memory on the server with heavy libraries.
2. JavaScript has better libraries to handle PDF generation on the client side.

I’ve been using paged.js and I’m very happy with the results. It even allows me to show a preview before printing to the client.

If you really need to create PDFs on the server side, the most popular library is PdfGenerator, which uses WKHTML instead of Chrome or Puppeteer.

This thread has quite a few options: Looking for a Prawn-Like PDF Generation Library in Elixir

I’ve been using Typst, a Rust library for generating PDFs from markdown. Typst is also a pure functional language such that you can put display logic into functions in a template to keep such logic out of Elixir.

To use the latest version, 0.12, you’ll want to use it on the command line from Elixir. There is an Elixir library that packages the Rust for version 0.3 called ExTypst and a fork that updates it to version 0.9.

Thank you. I did look at PDF generator but unfortunately WKHTML has been archived and is no longer available through brew or asdf. It seems most people are trying to migrate of it.

I find styling in in HTML and CSS then converting to PDF easier. As for generation using Chromium, the best way to do it is by using an AWS Lambda. Handles concurrency of multiple invocations perfectly.

Just done whole investigation into this for work (we are a Java house).

If you can avoid it in the first place, that’s the best approach (i.e. let the client print as pdf from their browser and use css3 styling for print media).

I did contemplate the XSL-FO route, but that seems progressively out of fashion, (I believe it’s down to the push for better CSS for printed media).

I also thought about postscript or tex, but that felt just as fiddly.

I would love to hear your results!

I think not, unless HTML will be page-size aware at some point, using that technology is very limited when it comes to generating more involved PDFs that actually need to follow some page structure.

I’ve used successfully latex for generating some pretty beefy PDFs before, however the way compiler was implemented makes it really hard to work with and it’s really laggy, especially if you have to do multiple passes. The best alternative on the market is mentioned above by @asianfilm, typst.

There is no great integration library in elixir, yet, but this shouldn’t stop you from using the compiler as external dependency.

Ah sorry I might’ve missed something. I thought CSS supports page sizing with size CSS at-rule descriptor - CSS | MDN

Unless we are talking different things?

Very interesting, this is certainly something new.

The main question is: can this be used to do things like displaying the page number at the bottom of every page?

Great question! No idea on that one I’m afraid!