PDFKit is a JavaScript library that generates PDF documents programmatically in Node.js. It works without converting HTML – you build documents from scratch using a canvas-like API for vector graphics, text, images, and tables. This guide covers PDFKit setup, text styling, custom fonts, colors, images, tables, invoice generation, Express.js integration, and document security.
PDFKit Python is a wrapper for wkhtmltopdf that converts HTML to PDF using the WebKit rendering engine. This guide covers Python HTML to PDF conversion with PDFKit, building a contract generator that produces multi-page documents with headers, footers, and custom styling. The tutorial uses Jinja2 for templating and walks through the full Python PDF generation workflow step by step.
Picking a Node.js PDF generation library isn't straightforward. There are browser-based tools that convert HTML to PDF, programmatic builders that create documents from scratch, and cloud APIs that handle everything remotely. This guide compares the five most downloaded libraries with actual npm numbers and working code examples.
Five Python libraries handle most HTML to PDF conversions today: Playwright, WeasyPrint, pdfkit, Pyppeteer, and xhtml2pdf. Below we compare them by download numbers, features, and code examples so you can pick the one that fits your project.