PDF (Portable Document Format) files remain a standard for sharing documents across different platforms and devices. For Node.js developers, PDFKit is a powerful library that allows you to generate PDFs programmatically with impressive flexibility and control. This comprehensive guide will walk you through everything you need to know about generating PDFs in Node.js using PDFKit.
PDF generation is a common requirement in many server-side applications, from creating invoices and reports to generating statements and certificates. Node.js, with its event-driven architecture and extensive ecosystem, is perfectly suited for handling PDF generation workflows. Among the various libraries available, PDFMake stands out as a robust, flexible, and feature-rich solution for PDF generation in Node.js applications. This comprehensive guide will walk you through everything you need to know about generating PDFs using PDFMake specifically in a Node.js environment, complete with practical examples and best practices.
In this article, we explore API-based PDF generation as a superior alternative to traditional tools like wkhtmltopdf and headless browsers like Playwright and Puppeteer. By leveraging HTML to PDF API solutions, you can streamline your development workflow by eliminating setup complexity and dependency management. Throughout this tutorial, you'll discover the key advantages of API-based conversion over headless browser alternatives and follow a complete Node.js implementation for creating professional invoice PDFs with minimal code. Our practical examples will help you integrate efficient PDF generation into your applications right away.
Generating invoice PDFs is a common requirement for web applications — whether for e-commerce, SaaS billing, or financial reporting. Puppeteer, a powerful headless browser automation tool for Node.js, makes it easy to convert HTML into high-quality PDFs. In this guide, we’ll walk you through setting up Puppeteer, designing an invoice with HTML and CSS, and generating a professional PDF.
Generating PDFs has become a crucial feature for many modern web applications, from creating invoices to producing complex data-driven reports. Over the years, various HTML to PDF tools have emerged, each with its own approach and capabilities. In this post, we’ll take a brief look at the evolution of PDF generation solutions — from wkhtmltopdf and PrinceXML (via DocRaptor) to Puppeteer and Playwright — and then walk through a short tutorial on using Playwright (Node.js) to generate a sample PDF in 2025.