![]() Tables must be drawn cell-by-cell, for example. PDFKit supports hardly any complex PDF functionality, with the exception of forms. Unlike the HTML-to-PDF libraries, PDFKit creates documents element-by-element, box-by-box. PDFKit is one of the oldest JavaScript-based libraries and is still under active development. It was created more recently than most of the libraries from this list and has the advantage of reusing some of their code without the limitations of an existing API PDFKit Overall, PDF-LIB seems like the most modern JavaScript PDF convertor. ![]() It supports forms, but misses other common features such as SVG images (you can draw SVG paths) or headers and footers. In addition to having excellent documentation and overall PDF creation capabilities, PDF-LIB also supports PDF editing-which is a relatively rare functionality. We strongly recommend against using PhantomJS, as it's buggy and lacks modern HTML and JavaScript support. It relies upon the PhantomJS headless browser, which is based on an incredibly old version of WebKit. The node-html-pdf library is obviously Node.js-only. Most HTML to PDF generators solve this with a single CSS property like content: "Page " counter(page, upper-alpha) " of " counter(pages, decimal). Even then, something as simple and common as adding page numbers involves looping through all the pages and inserting a page number element on each page. Our recommendation would be to avoid using jsPDF for HTML to PDF conversion, and instead only use jsPDF as a PDF generator. While there are helpful guides available elsewhere and many StackOverflow answers, we found the learning curve to be steep. The jsPDF documentation is entirely focused on the method definitions and lacks tutorials for using these methods. html2canvas also doesn't work in Node.js, though standard jsPDF does. html2canvas supports a wide range of CSS properties, but is still considered experimental and not recommended for production usage. It is primarily focused on creating PDFs in an element-by-element, object-by-object style, but it does support HTML to PDF rendering through the html2canvas library. JsPDF is one of the most popular JavaScript PDF generators. It's best for less complex documents, but still superior to any other HTML-to-PDF libraries. The only downside is Chrome's lack of PDF-specific functionality such as headers and footers, accessible PDFs, page float, to name just a few. It's the most popular open-source HTML-to-PDF converter and has the best support for modern HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Puppeteer is a Node.js (no client-side support) library for accessing headless Chromium. We'll specifically note if a library is only server-side or client-side. The large majority of libraries support both server-side Node.js and client-side JavaScript, so we've created just one guide to cover both. We'll review the most popular Node.js and JavaScript HTML to PDF libraries, as well as a few non-HTML-based and even non-JavaScript-based options. We haven't tried all these libraries in a production environment, so please do further testing and evaluation on your document-but we believe our shared PDF knowledge provides useful insight. ![]() Our goal is to speed up your research and save you pain. Creating PDFs from HTML can be surprisingly different than creating standard web pages. We'll use our extensive experience in PDF generation to compare the most popular JavaScript-based libraries.
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