Rotativa VS WeasyPrint

I've been using Rotativa[1] for URL to PDF generation which is also a wrapper for wkhtmltopdf. They have a dotnet-core[2] version and also a SaaS[3] but I think it's worth mentioning that Azure PaaS supports wkhtmltopdf natively[4] so I just self-host.

Looking at QuestPDF's API docs, it doesn't look like they support URL / HTML to PDF generation. I think this would be a great addition especially given the age and issues with Rotativa and TuesPechkin on their GitHubs.

[1] https://github.com/webgio/Rotativa

I've used numerous technologies for doing that conversion, including WebSuperGoo's ABCpdf.net, and Rotativa's free library. (We even have an article on how to use it.) The latter is still in use on some of my projects, but it—and its newer .Net Core version—is based on wkhtmltopdf.exe, which is a problem. More about that later.

Is there a reason you didn't consider something like Weasyprint?

https://weasyprint.org

I've gone through a number of systems to convert CV's, business cards, and other docs and it hasn't let me down yet.

You don't _have_ to use a browser. I had very good results with Weasyprint [0]. And there's also PrinceXML [1] if you're willing to pay.

[0]: https://weasyprint.org/

Thanks for your answer! I imagined you would be using PrinceXML behind the scenes since that is probably the gold standard in HTML+CSS rendering.

The only open source alternative I know of is WeasyPrint at https://weasyprint.org/. I'm not sure how well it fares against PrinceXML, though.

And thanks for the pointer to Taffy - I didn't know it before!

Flexbox support has been [included][1] since 2018, although my use case was the prototypical one - a single row w/ 3 columns - so YMMV with how it handles more complex layouts.

[1]: https://github.com/Kozea/WeasyPrint/pull/579

Performance is not the strength of WeasyPrint, meaning that heavy HTML files will increase generation time. You should always compress images before attaching them, as they are not compressed by default. Generating a 50-page-long PDF may take up to a minute in extreme cases, although multi-page documents generated on my project take fewer than 2 seconds to generate.

For Python there is Weasyprint: you prepare the invoice as an HTML document, and Weasyprint turns it into a PDF

https://weasyprint.org/

Well yes, but you can implement HTML+CSS. WeasyPrint did from scratch, and independent implementations of HTML+CSS are considerably more numerous than HTML+CSS+JS.

In a recent project I used https://github.com/Kozea/WeasyPrint/ it is written in python, so you will need to use it like so:

You should maybe check out weasyprint. https://weasyprint.org/