mPDF VS puppeteer

Generating PDF documents out of your app's HTML output is a very common requirement and there are several open source libraries to accomplish this. I came across this need for my project recently and I evaluated many popular ones such as TCPDF, mpdf, FPDF, etc. But the one that truly stood up to my evaluation in terms of efficiency (minimal footprint) and ease of implementation was DOMPDF.

Not sure if it has all the things you need but we use https://mpdf.github.io/

I'm currently using mPDF for large reports including tables, graphs, and complex formatting.

Visit this link for more options and settings: https://mpdf.github.io/

mPDF (very similar to TCPDF)

Writing a piece of code for a problem that has already being solved, tested and approved by other developers slows down the development of an application by a huge amount of time. For instance, trying to create a functionality that enables PDF files to be downloadable on a website is a waste of time when you have a package like mPDF that does that.

Full mPDF Documentation

About mPDF https://mpdf.github.io/ "mPDF is a PHP library which generates PDF files from UTF-8 encoded HTML."

For PHP-based applications I've used mPDF[0], which generates PDFs from HTML without using a browser. I'm sure it can't handle all the CSS bells/whistles that a "modern" website uses, but it's worked well for me.

[0]: https://github.com/mpdf/mpdf

My personal favorite server allows my Cursor agent to drive Puppeteer, a browser automation framework. I love this server because it enables the agnet to navigate my apps as I'm building them, to interact with them, and to take screenshots.

Puppeteer is a Node.js library that provides a high-level API to control Google Chrome or Chromium browsers. Developers use Puppeteer to automate browser tasks like navigating pages, clicking elements, taking screenshots, and even generating PDFs.

If you want to create PDFs or screenshots of sites the best solution is Puppeteer (https://pptr.dev/). The problem is that if you have Emojis or languages such CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) they are not included in the default layers provided.

Hey HN! I'm Ivan. I've been working on a solution to visually debug my own https://pptr.dev/ crashes, and this week I opened it to the public: https://buglesstack.com/.

If you have any questions or suggestions to improve it, feel free to contact me at [email protected].

Thanks for reading! <3

Puppeteer is a headless browser automation tool built on Chromium. It allows developers to simulate user interactions, capture screenshots, and perform UI tests with a high degree of accuracy. Puppeteer is particularly useful for testing cross-browser compatibility and visual elements in React applications. Its robust API enables precise control over browser actions, making it a valuable tool for UI testing and debugging.

puppeteer: Puppeteer is a powerful NodeJS library that automates tasks in a headless browser. It allows interaction with page elements, making it helpful in scraping dynamic content.

Vitest is a next-generation JavaScript testing framework powered by Vite. It’s an excellent alternative to Jest, offering native TypeScript support, a fast setup, and solid performance. However, while it has an experimental headless browser, it’s not ideal for advanced scenarios like running SEO audits in CI/CD pipelines. Instead, we can pair Vitest with Pupetter, a more mature tool for headless browser automation.

This guide is intended for beginners or anyone who's never tried web scraping in general. We will walk through creating a web scraper using Puppeteer to validate links on a website. I'll explain each section of the code and offer some tips along the way.

Pupeeter — Web scraping engine

Playwrite, Pupeeter