[datavirtue]

Nobody wants to ship Chromium with their pdf library or application. How do I get a print preview? If I do convince myself to lug around chromium, do I invoke Chromium each time for 1000 PDFs in a batch? Do I want to pay to invoke chromium on a EC2 instance or lambda?

Every document production library that handles HTML (a very popular feature) has had to implement HTML/CSS parsing.

I and many others are using HTML and CSS to declaratively lay out complex , dynamic documents (or trying to at least). Seems to make sense but we have ten more years to go before it's fully solved. Right now it costs serious coin to do it (unless you are releasing FOSS) and it ain't fun.