Comment by socalgal2

Comment by socalgal2 3 days ago

7 replies

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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 3 days ago

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.

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  • nicoburns 3 days ago

    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?

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  • specproc 2 days ago

    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.

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  • nutjob2 2 days ago

    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.

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strbean a day ago

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/

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