Ask HN: What made you move back to HTML-to-PDF in production?

5•gokulsiva•8h ago

Curious what broke first — pagination, tables, fonts, or maintainability.

Context: I’m asking because I’m building an open-source tool around server-side HTML → PDF and keep seeing teams try “lighter” libraries first, then fall back to headless Chrome in production.

Curious where that tipping point was for you.

Comments

baggy_trough•8h ago

I only know how to lay things out well in HTML, so I never moved away from it.

gokulsiva•6h ago

That makes sense. Have you run into any pain points once documents got large or more structured (tables, headers/footers, multi-page), or has HTML held up fine for you so far?

baggy_trough•5h ago

Yeah, the fact that Chrome doesn't support a lot of the CSS pagination properties is a problem. We have to use paged.js to do table of contents for example. And that requires controlling Chrome via puppeteer or the like. That's been a bit of a pain.

gokulsiva•3h ago

Yeah, that matches my experience too — Chrome gets you ~80% there, but the missing pagination primitives push you into extra layers like paged.js.

I’ve also hit issues with tables and page breaks.

Curious if TOC was the main blocker for you, or if there were other cases where Chrome alone didn’t hold up.

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Ask HN: What made you move back to HTML-to-PDF in production?

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