PDF generation is one of those things that works perfectly… until real users touch it.
On localhost:
npm run dev
Open Chrome → print → PDF.
Done.
Then production arrives.
A customer generates a 200-page report.
Finance exports 5,000 invoices at midnight.
A marketing team uploads a font your server has never seen.
Suddenly your "simple PDF endpoint" becomes the most fragile part of your stack.
The hidden problems nobody talks about
- Chromium is not a PDF library
Most HTML-to-PDF systems are secretly browser automation systems.
You are not calling:
HTML → PDF
You are calling:
HTML → Browser → Renderer → PDF
That means you inherit:
browser crashes
memory spikes
process cleanup
sandboxing problems
version updates
Your app does not need a browser.
It needs a document.
- Concurrency changes everything
A single PDF generation request?
Easy.
100 requests at the same time?
Now you need:
queues
workers
retries
timeouts
monitoring
The PDF code you wrote in 20 minutes becomes infrastructure you maintain forever.
- CSS is the real enemy
The HTML looks perfect in Chrome.
The PDF comes out broken.
Common issues:
tables split incorrectly
headers disappear
fonts fallback
images fail loading
page breaks happen randomly
Because printing is not the same as rendering a webpage.
- Security is overlooked
HTML rendering means executing a browser against user-controlled content.
A malicious document can try:
internal network requests
metadata endpoints
local file access
A PDF service needs isolation.
Not just a browser process.
The approach I took with PDFPipe
Instead of giving every developer another Puppeteer setup guide:
The goal is:
Your app
|
| HTML + data
↓
PDFPipe
|
↓
PDF
No Chromium servers.
No worker management.
No PDF infrastructure.
The same reason we use Stripe instead of running payment infrastructure ourselves.
The funny thing about PDF generation is:
Nobody notices when it works.
Everyone notices when it breaks.
That is exactly why I started building PDFPipe.
Curious: what is your current PDF stack?
Puppeteer? Playwright? wkhtmltopdf? Something older?