[socalgal2]

Maybe this isn't the same but it's a relatively few lines of code to use puppeteer to use an actual browser to render pages to PDFs/PNGs. Advantages would be everything is supported. Every new feature in CSS, HTML, SVG, Canvas2D, WebGL, WebGPU, etc... (though for WebGL/WebGPU you might need to pass in some flags to use llvmpipe/mesa/warp etc...

Asking your favorite LLM will give you da codez

PS: I'm not trying to discount this tool. I'm only pointing out an alternative that might be useful

[sammycage]

That’s a good point. Using Puppeteer or a headless browser gives you essentially full web platform support. The tradeoff is that it comes with a heavier runtime and more moving parts (Chromium, Node, etc.). PlutoPrint aims to be much lighter: no browser dependency, just a compact C++ engine with a Python wrapper. It does not cover the entire browser feature set but it is fast, portable, and easy to drop into projects without the overhead of a full browser.

[nicoburns]

Interesting. I was not aware of PlutoBook!

We're doing a very similar thing (custom lightweight engine) over at https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz. We have more of a focus on UI, but there's definitely overlap (we support rendering to image, but don't have pagination/fragmentation implemented).

Have you run the WPT tests against your engine to test spec conformance?

[specproc]

I did this for a project recently, using Firefox and Selenium. It totally worked, but was very heavy on the dependencies and felt very clumsy.

This is exactly what I was looking for a few months ago. I might revisit that project with it.

[realitysballs]

Excellent response

[nutjob2]

Your approach is also more predictable. Trying to figure out why Chromium is doing something strange with a complicated page is not practical, while a simple, lean package like this means you can look at the code, trace it and patch it if need be.

[slig]

Exactly what I was wondering. I use puppeteer to render these [1] printable puzzles pages, and I use SVG, JavaScript to dynamically resize the text to fit a page, etc. Just works.

[1]: https://ahapdf.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/samplers/logi... (PDF)

[strbean]

Gotenberg[0] wraps up Chromium nicely for this purpose. However, at scale, spinning up Chromium for each PDF you want to generate is painful. I'd definitely consider a solution like PlutoPrint.

0: https://gotenberg.dev/