QuestPDF VS WeasyPrint

What is QuestPDF? QuestPDF is an open-source .NET library for PDF document generation. It uses a fluent API approach to compose together many simple elements to create complex documents.

QuestPDF looks really good (I haven't used it) but I believe they changed their license recently.

I used that same library it worked great the only issue I had was the users would often have to manually set the scaling to fit to a page. I'm sure I could've fixed this in other ways if I was more competent with CSS but ended up just switching to use https://github.com/QuestPDF/QuestPDF in a backend instead of doing everything in front end.

Give this a try: QuestPDF

I think you should ask these questions in related discussion on Github: https://github.com/QuestPDF/QuestPDF/discussions/491

May I introduce you to QuestPDF!

➡️ James Newton-King ♔ on Twitter: "Coming in .NET 8: Route tooling for ASP.NET Core" / Twitter ➡️ Announcing .NET Community Toolkit 8.1 ➡️ Uno Platform 4.7 – New Project Template, Performance Improvements and more ➡️ C# Advent 2022 Awards | Cross Cutting Concerns ➡️ GitHub - QuestPDF ➡️ DNF Summit 2023 ➡️ .NET Frontend Day

Like many have suggested, I also cast my vote on QuestPDF. No more +50MB library including a Chrome browser to render HTML so a PDF of it can be created, which took 2-3 seconds each time. But with QuestPDF, it's so much faster!

Also, the library is open-source, so you can take a look at the exact implementation of the layout engine. It is inspired by Flutter and WPF, though optimized for pageable content: https://github.com/QuestPDF/QuestPDF/tree/main/Source/QuestPDF/Elements

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/