Thanks to everyone who replied, I ended up choosing Typst. The markdown is pretty powerful and easy to learn. There free online editor makes it easy to experiment with the markdown as well.

I don’t have any data to back this up but figured a rust library would be more performant than weasyprint in python

I could not get ex_typst to work, so I just called the typst compiler using System.cmd.

I have a base .typ file that has the layout and template variables. I use elixir’s EEx to fill out the data and write a .typ file to a temporary location. Finally I execute the typst compiler using the shell.

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.

@arun1 not sure if you still need a solution here, but in case it helps: we’re using Gotenberg to generate PDF’s from HTML/CSS. We’re running the default Gotenberg Docker image and use the HTTP API to convert rendered Phoenix templates to PDF.

This is especially nice because we can use all the normal view helpers and Tailwind styling that we have throughout our application, and these days things like a table of contents or page numbering is pretty much solved in CSS.

Let me know if you’re interested in some example code of our setup, and the resulting PDF file!