Himanshu Jain Posted on May 31 I Built pretext-pdf: Serverless PDFs Without Chromium # pdf # opensource # serverless # showdev I Built pretext-pdf: Serverless PDFs Without Chromium I got frustrated with PDF generation in Node.js. Every tool had trade-offs, and none of them felt right. The Problem Every time I needed to generate PDFs programmatically, I hit the same walls: Puppeteer — Renders HTML to PDF beautifully, but takes 500ms-2s per page. Way too slow for batch operations. wkhtmltopdf — Old, fragile, breaks in production, dependency hell. pdfmake — Good for simple invoices, falls apart with complex layouts. All of them — Overkill if you're not rendering HTML. And here's the kicker: I didn't need to render HTML. I had structured data (invoices, reports, certificates) that I needed to turn into PDFs programmatically . The Solution I built pretext-pdf — a JSON-based PDF generation library. Instead of: javascript // ❌ Puppeteer: render HTML const browser = await puppeteer.launch(); const page = await browser.newPage(); await page.setContent(html); const pdf = await page.pdf(); // 1000ms+ You do: // ✅ pretext-pdf: define structure const doc = { sections: [ { type: 'heading', text: 'Invoice' }, { type: 'table', rows: [...] } ] }; const pdf = await renderPDF(doc); // 40-100ms No Chromium. No external dependencies. Pure Node.js. Why This Matters If you're building: ✅ Invoice generation systems ✅ Dynamic reports for your SaaS ✅ AI agents that create PDFs (Claude, Cursor, Windsurf) ✅ Certificate systems ✅ Multi-language documents ...pretext-pdf is built for you. Today: v2.0.14 Launch I just shipped a major upgrade. The text layout engine (which handles how words break across lines) is now significantly better: Better CJK + Latin mixed-script handling Smarter punctuation (quotes stay with their text) 7-12% faster Zero breaking changes The Stats 337 tests passing — production-ready 0 critical vulnerabilities — secure MIT licensed — free to use Open source — contribute or
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