Compare manual browser printing, a managed HTML to PDF API, and running your own renderer. Choose based on how often you generate documents and how much infrastructure you want to maintain.
Occasional documents
Open an HTML page, select Print, and save it as a PDF. This is a practical starting point when a person can review and save each document.
Trade-off: Someone must repeat the export and check print settings. It becomes cumbersome for recurring invoices or reports.
Repeatable application workflows
Reuse HTML templates and send JSON data through an API to generate documents from your application. Review the output in the playground before automating it.
Trade-off: Generation depends on an external service, account quotas and supported rendering features. Check these against your data and volume requirements.
Custom infrastructure requirements
Run a browser or PDF library in your own environment when you need direct control over the rendering process and deployment.
Trade-off: Your team maintains updates, resource limits, fonts, queues, retries and isolation for untrusted input.
Start with one representative invoice or report. Check page breaks, long tables, custom fonts, images and non-Latin characters. Then test missing data, long descriptions and a document spanning several pages. A simple demo does not tell you whether your production layout will work.
With Templatr, store an HTML template, fill its variables and loops with JSON, and generate a PDF through the API. Keep document content in HTML and CSS: scripts inside uploaded templates are not executed. Use the playground to check the result before integrating your workflow.
Start generating PDFs in minutes with our simple API.