PDF development resources

Gathering some options for generating PDFs and pros/cons, in particular for very large PDF reports (100+ pages). Creating such large PDFs in a fast and reliable way is not trivial.

Puppeteer

• Chromium based. Lots of print features, battle tested.
• Generates large PDF files and is extremely slow (5000 rows takes 2 minutes to generate).
• Can easily crash or run out of memory

react-pdf

• Kind of supports tables
• Uses pdfkit internally
• Development is slow, React18 not officially supported

pdfmake

Supports tables/multipage, but unstable/beta.

react-to-print

Render everything in the browser using HTML, and then use browser's print function to print/generate PDF from a subset of the page.

• Slow in Chrome (like Puppeteer)
• Generates huge files (900mb for 5000 rows.)

pdfme

Template based. Not suited for multi-page tables.

Low level JS PDF libraries

These have seemingly no multipage layouts and table support:

• https://github.com/parallax/jsPDF
• https://github.com/foliojs/pdfkit
• https://github.com/Hopding/pdf-lib

html2pdf.js

• uses jsPDF
• Con: Renders all content into an image, then places that image into a PDF: This means text is not selectable or searchable, and causes large file sizes.

Alternatives

CSV

Fast and easy to generate. No layout/styling possibilities.

XLSX export

Although XLSX does have layout options, styling is only suported in their Pro version https://sheetjs.com/pro alternatively https://github.com/gitbrent/xlsx-js-style