sanzarrehman/html2pdf

htmltopdf is a tool that converts HTML files into PDF documents. Unlike many other HTML-to-PDF tools that secretly run the Google Chrome browser in the background to do the conversion, this project builds its own rendering engine from scratch in the Rust programming language. The goal is to handle many conversions at the same time on a server, using far less memory and CPU than launching a full browser for each job. On a real-world test file (a 1.8 megabyte spreadsheet export with around 22,000 table cells), htmltopdf was about four times faster than headless Chrome and used roughly nine times less RAM. Chromium needed about 850 megabytes of memory per conversion, htmltopdf handled the same job in about 92 megabytes. When you need to convert hundreds of documents at once, that difference adds up quickly. The engine handles a solid chunk of what HTML and CSS actually describe: paragraphs, headings, lists, tables, flexbox and grid layouts, floats, and positioned elements. It also supports Unicode, mixed left-to-right and right-to-left text (so Arabic or Hebrew inside an English sentence renders correctly), proper font embedding, and clickable links inside the resulting PDF. Images in JPEG and PNG format are supported too. If you need JavaScript to build the page before it is rendered, there is an opt-in feature that runs a small JavaScript environment before layout begins. The project is honest about what it cannot do yet. SVG, remote image loading, and some advanced JavaScript behaviors are not implemented. Dynamic CSS states like hover and focus are intentionally not supported, since they do not apply to printed output. The README describes it as an early engine, not a complete browser replacement. It ships as a command-line tool, a Rust library you can import into your own code, and a lightweight HTTP server for server-to-server use. The MIT license means you can use it in commercial projects without restrictions. Anyone building a backend service that needs to generate PDFs at scale, such as invoice generation or report exports, would find this more practical than running a full browser process for each file.