Bohdan Shtelmakh

Posted on Apr 2

I built an HTML-to-PDF engine 10x faster than Puppeteer

#node #javascript #pdf #webdev

If you've ever generated PDFs on a backend — invoices, reports, receipts — you've probably used Puppeteer or Playwright. They work, but they're slow.

Spinning up a headless Chrome instance to render a simple invoice takes 2–4 seconds, eats 300+ MB of RAM, and cold starts in serverless environments are brutal.

I needed something faster. So I built html-pdf-lite — a lightweight HTML-to-PDF converter for Node.js that skips Chrome entirely.

How fast?

Engine	Time per PDF	Memory
Puppeteer	2–4s	~300 MB
html-pdf-lite	200–400ms	~50 MB

That's 10x faster with 6x less memory.

How it works

Instead of launching a browser, html-pdf-lite:

Parses HTML with JSDOM
Applies CSS cascade (specificity, inheritance, variables, shorthands)
Renders directly to PDF using PDFKit

No Chrome. No Playwright. No browser binary to install.

npm install html-pdf-lite

const { renderPdfFromHtml } = require('html-pdf-lite');
const fs = require('fs');

const html = `
  <h1>Invoice #1042</h1>
  <table>
    <tr><td>Widget</td><td>$10.00</td></tr>
    <tr><td>Gadget</td><td>$25.00</td></tr>
  </table>
  <p><strong>Total: $35.00</strong></p>
`;

const pdf = await renderPdfFromHtml(html);
fs.writeFileSync('invoice.pdf', pdf);

That's it. One function, returns a Buffer.

What it supports

Headings, paragraphs, spans, links
Tables with colspan and styled cells
Flexbox and CSS Grid layout
Ordered and unordered lists
Images (PNG, JPEG, SVG, data URIs)
Inline SVG rendering
Page breaks (break-before, break-inside: avoid)
Internal PDF links (href="#section")
CSS variables, shorthands, specificity cascade
Custom fonts with system font auto-detection
@page margin rules

What it doesn't support

This is not a full browser engine. If you need:

Perfect flexbox/grid parity with Chrome
JavaScript-rendered content
Advanced CSS (animations, transforms, filters)

Use Puppeteer. That's the right tool for those cases.

html-pdf-lite is for when you have a known HTML template and need a PDF fast — APIs, invoices, reports, serverless functions.

Perfect for serverless

No Chromium binary means:

Deploys to AWS Lambda without layers or custom runtimes
Works on Vercel, Cloudflare Workers, Railway
Cold starts in milliseconds, not seconds
Fits in small container images

Open source

MIT licensed. 11 test suites. CI on every push.

GitHub: github.com/BohdanShtelmakh/html-to-pdf
npm: npmjs.com/package/html-pdf-lite

If it helped you, star the repo. If something doesn't render right, open an issue with a minimal HTML example and I'll fix it.

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