[dmkolobov]

It was!

I remember the afternoon I had the idea: it was beer Friday -and it took a few hours to write up a basic prototype that rendered a PDF in a few hundred milliseconds. That was the first time I’d written a 100x speed improvement. Felt like a real rush.

[mherrmann]

Congratulations. Doesn't make this approach make so much more sense than writing a browser engine from scratch?

[dmkolobov]

Maybe? I'd say it depends on what you're rendering. We rendered HTML that we created ourselves, filled in with data that we parsed and validated. Styles across the documents generated were also largely the same.

If your job is to render arbitrary user HTML, this could get much more hairy. First of all, print rendering at the time(and probably now) was notoriously finicky. Things like adjusting colors, improper rendering of SVGs, pagination were difficult. It took a lot of effort to get right.

Furthermore, if you're sending arbitrary HTML, you now have a much larger security exploit surface. If someone figures out how to call `addEventListener` within the page context, they can snoop on every PDF generated by that page.