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Ask HN: What made you move back to HTML-to-PDF in production?
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.
- baggy_trough 9mo agoI only know how to lay things out well in HTML, so I never moved away from it.
- gokulsiva 9mo agoThat 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 9mo agoYeah, 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 9mo agoYeah, 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.
- baggy_trough 9mo agoThat's really the main one I remember.
- gokulsiva 9mo ago[dead]
- TheCapeGreek 9mo agoI've never found any lib or tooling (in my ecosystem) that DIDN'T use html -> pdf
- gokulsiva 9mo agoyou mean node ?