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Comment by exhilaration | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know how this compares to PrinceXML / DocRapotor? We pay them big bucks for PDF generation (invoices specifically) and so far we haven't found anything comparable.

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Not sure about paged.js, but we use Weasyprint for invoices. It isn’t as advanced as some of the paid options (most annoyingly page headers are somewhat hacky) but it works very well.

My go-to for everything CSS Paged Media is [0] which has a nice comparison of supported features at [1]. They recently added Weasyprint, PagedJS and Typeset.sh

[0]: https://css.paged.media/

[1]: https://css.paged.media/lessons

A few years ago I started an alternative to PrinceXML called ReLaXed.js [1], it's always been sufficient for my reports but it may lack some pagination/layout features that Paged.js may have as they seem to have given this much more thoughts (still wrapping my head around whether paged.js could be "plugged into" Relaxed).

[1] https://github.com/RelaxedJS/ReLaXed

Have you tried using Chromium print-to-pdf by an API like Puppeteer or Playwright? Combined with something like paged.js and a decent print stylesheet, you can get pretty good quality output.

I was a huge supporter of PrinceXML / DocRaptor for precisely the same reason - all the alternatives (that I knew at the time) were not good.

Paged.js was a revelation (thanks to HN for telling me about it!). It is based off CSS Print Specifications like PrinceXML (as is my understanding - I’m about 95% sure), and to me it’s even better because it utilizes all the other front end technologies directly from your browser - I think there are some use cases where PrinceXML won’t be able to get the same functionality.

For invoices, I think you should be able to easily switch over. Based on what I can see.

I also pay a lot per month to DocRaptor and they’ve been very reliable to date, but unless I’m rendering charts with JS I feel like I’m really overspending

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