Devs: Why is generating PDFs still such a pain in 2026?
I'm building a tool to fix this, but I want to validate if I'm the only one who finds this workflow insane.
Every time I need to generate a dynamic invoice or report, I end up with two bad options:
Headless Browsers: Managing Puppeteer/Playwright instances that eat RAM and crash randomly.
Black Box APIs: Sending HTML to an endpoint and praying the CSS renders correctly (usually involves running the script 50 times just to align a div).
I’ve spent the recent time building a "Live Preview" editor where you can actually debug the Handlebars/Jinja2 template before generating the PDF. It essentially kills the "change code -> run script -> check PDF" loop.
My Question: What is your current "least worst" solution for generating PDFs? Is it a library? An API? Or do you just hack it with print stylesheets?
Launching the solution tomorrow! ⚡
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