speed-comparison VS WeasyPrint

For example, Java runs on the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) instead of running directly on the hardware, and it also has a garbage collector to handle memory management. Running on a virtual machine means your code is more abstracted: you only have to worry about the JVM and not about the platform you’re running on (since the JVM is the platform), and it’s more portable since your code can go on anything that runs the JVM. But running the JVM as an intermediate layer takes more computing power and so does running garbage collection, meaning that you experience a performance penalty. Here’s one benchmark I could find comparing the use of different programming languages to compute pi, in which Java took about 3x as long as C to complete the same task

Or you've got the speed comparisons (https://github.com/niklas-heer/speed-comparison) -- Python is probably something like 10% the speed of C/C++ (although, like I said, 99% of the time that's comparable to premature optimization).

Looks like a PR was merged yesterday to make the code more simd friendly https://github.com/niklas-heer/speed-comparison/pull/52

Sure, they could have chosen Python. But I doubt the language differences account for even a noticeable percentage of the slowness of Brew.

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/