Building dynamic, data-driven websites means generating HTML from live data. Template engines handle this by combining HTML layouts with variables, loops, and conditionals. This article covers what template engines are, how they work, their benefits, and the most popular options for Node.js, Python, Java, PHP, and Ruby.
If you need to generate PDFs from HTML in a production app, you have two options: run a local rendering tool yourself (Puppeteer, Playwright, wkhtmltopdf) or call an HTML to PDF API that does the rendering for you. This tutorial covers the API approach with a complete Node.js example that generates invoice PDFs using EJS templates and the PDFBolt API. You will also find a comparison with headless browser solutions to help you pick the right tool for your project.
PDF generation is a core requirement for many web applications – invoices, reports, contracts, certificates. Over the years, various HTML to PDF tools have taken different approaches to the problem. In this post, we look at the evolution of PDF generation solutions – from wkhtmltopdf and PrinceXML (via DocRaptor) to Puppeteer and Playwright – and then walk through a tutorial on using Playwright (Node.js) to generate a sample invoice PDF.