At a previous company we moved off of wkhtmltopdf to a nodejs service which received static html and rendered it to pdf using phantomjs. These days you probably use puppeteer.

The trick was keeping the page context open to avoid chrome startup costs and recreating `page`. The node service would initialize a page object once with a script inside which would communicate with the server via a named Linux pipe. Then, for each request:

1. node service sends the static html to the page over the pipe

2. the page script receives the html from the pipe, inserts it into the DOM, and sends an “ack” back over the pipe

3. the node service receives the “ack” and calls the pdf rendering method on the page.

I don’t remember why we chose the pipe method: I’m sure there’s a better way to pass data to headless contexts these days.

The whole thing was super fast(~20ms) compared to WK, which took at least 30 seconds for us, and would more often than not just time out.

I've made posts about it on HN before but they've never gained traction. I hope that this takes off.

You guys make neat software.

The phrase "living standard" is an oxymoron, invented by the incumbents who want to pretend they're supporting standards while weaponising constant change to keep themselves incumbent.

A "standard" should mean there is a clear goal to work towards to for authors and browser vendors. For example, if a browser implements CSS 2.1 (the last sanely defined CSS version), its vendor can say "we support CSS 2.1", authors who care enough can check their CSS using a validator, and users can report if a CSS 2.1 feature is implemented incorrectly.

With a living standard (e.g. HTML5), all you get is a closed circle of implementations which must add a feature before it is specified. Restricting the number of implementations to one and omitting the descriptive prose sounds even worse than the status quo.

care to tell us more?

The least-needed features are often accessibility nightmares (e.g. animation - although usually not semantic).

The accessible subset could then be government standardized and used as a legal hammer against over-complex HTML sites.

For a while search engines helped because they encouraged sites to focus on being more informative (html DOCUMENTS).

I think web applications are a huge improvement over Windows applications, however dynamic HTML is a nightmare. Old school forms were usable.

(edited to improve) Disclosure: wrote a js framework and SPA mid 00's (so I've been more on the problem side than the solution side).