PDF Generation in Modern Web Applications

Generating PDF documents is a common requirement in many web applications. Whether you’re creating invoices, reports, or certificates, there are several approaches to generate PDFs in your web application.

Client-Side PDF Generation

Using JavaScript libraries like jsPDF or PDF.js, you can generate PDFs directly in the browser:

import { jsPDF } from 'jspdf'

const generatePDF = () => {
  const doc = new jsPDF()

  doc.text('Hello world!', 10, 10)
  doc.addPage()
  doc.text('This is a second page', 10, 10)

  doc.save('generated.pdf')
}

Server-Side PDF Generation

For more complex PDFs or when you need to handle sensitive data, server-side generation is often preferred:

Node.js Options

• PDFKit: A PDF document generation library for Node.js
• Puppeteer: Generate PDFs by rendering HTML with headless Chrome
• wkhtmltopdf: Convert HTML to PDF using WebKit rendering engine

Other Languages

• Python: ReportLab, WeasyPrint
• Ruby: Prawn, wicked_pdf
• PHP: TCPDF, FPDF
• Java: iText, Apache PDFBox

HTML-to-PDF Conversion

One of the most flexible approaches is to design your document in HTML/CSS and convert it to PDF:

// Using Puppeteer in Node.js
const puppeteer = require('puppeteer')

async function generatePDF() {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch()
  const page = await browser.newPage()

  await page.setContent('<h1>Hello PDF World!</h1>')

  const pdf = await page.pdf({ format: 'A4' })

  await browser.close()
  return pdf
}

This approach leverages your existing HTML/CSS skills and provides the most design flexibility.