mdbook-pdf VS mdbook-latex

mdbook-pdf depends on Google Chrome / Microsoft Edge / Chromium. The generated page are pretty much alike the one you manually print to PDF in your browser by opening print.html or executing google-chrome-stable --headless --print-to-pdf=output.pdf file:///path/to/print.html, but with customization of PDF paper orientation, scale of the webpage rendering, paper width and height, page margins, generated PDF page ranges, whether to display header and footer as well as customize their formats, and more, as well as automation. It supports all the platform where Google Chrome / Microsoft Edge / Chromium would work. You can check samples of the generated PDF files in the Artifacts here (The Rust book collections generated in x86_64 Windows, macOS as well as Linux).

mdBook allows you to create book from markdown files. It's pretty much alike Gitbook but implemented in Rust. However, unlike Gitbook that supports using calibre for generating PDF, for a long time, mdBook doesn't support generating PDF files natively, and supporting that is also not in their roadmap. Existing plugins (backends) such as mdbook-latex that utilize Tectonic as well as pandoc solutions will generate a PDF page that doesn't unify with the existing mdBook generated HTML version. Considering these facts, I created a mdBook backend named mdbook-pdf for generating PDF based on headless chrome and Chrome DevTools Protocol Page.printToPDF.