How to generate PDFs with Puppeteer

Puppeteer is a Node.js library that provides a high-level API to control Google Chrome or Chromium browsers. Developers use Puppeteer to automate browser tasks like navigating pages, clicking elements, taking screenshots, and even generating PDFs.

Because it runs a real headless browser, Puppeteer can render web pages exactly as in a browser, including full CSS, images, and webfonts, making it ideal for converting HTML pages into PDFs (for reports, receipts, invoices, etc.). In practice, you can script Puppeteer to open a URL or HTML content and call page.pdf() to save a PDF file of the rendered page.

Generating PDFs with Puppeteer

First, install Puppeteer via npm install puppeteer. Then you can write a script like this to create a PDF:

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch();

  const page = await browser.newPage();

  // Navigate to the page or set HTML content
  await page.goto('https://example.com', { waitUntil: 'networkidle0' });

  // Generate PDF.
  // Options include format (A4, letter), margins, landscape, etc.
  await page.pdf({ path: 'example.pdf', format: 'A4' });

  await browser.close();
})();

This example uses await page.pdf({path: 'example.pdf', format: 'A4'}) to save the page as a PDF. Under the hood, Puppeteer waits for the page to load (including fonts and images) and then prints it to PDF. You can customize page size, margins, headers/footers, and more by passing options to page.pdf().

Challenges of a DIY Puppeteer solution

Using Puppeteer directly gives you fine-grained control over how pages render, but it comes with challenges. You must manage headless Chrome instances yourself, installing or updating Chrome/Chromium, handling memory leaks or crashes, and orchestrating multiple processes.

In fact, one developer notes that “managing headless browsers is a huge pain. The browsers might have memory leaks and sudden restarts”, and that running many concurrent PDFs can become “a computation-heavy task for servers”.

In short, you get precise results, but you also inherit complex operational burdens. Scaling this setup (for example, generating dozens of PDFs per second) requires your own infrastructure, load balancing, and monitoring.

• Pros: Complete control over rendering. You can wait for specific elements or animations, then print to PDF.
• Cons: Requires heavy lifting (browser updates, memory management).
• Scalability Issues: Running multiple headless Chrome instances is CPU/memory intensive, making it hard to scale horizontally.
• Quality Issues: Some dynamic content or print-specific CSS may not work perfectly without tweaking.

Because of these hassles, many teams look for a hosted service. That’s where another solution comes in.

Simplifying PDF generation

ScreenshotMAX HTML to PDF API automatically filters out distracting elements like cookie banners and ads, producing clean PDF outputs without any extra effort. Instead of writing and maintaining your own Puppeteer code, you can use ScreenshotMAX’s hosted API. It wraps headless Chrome in a cloud service so you can focus on your application logic. ScreenshotMAX offers an all-in-one API: it supports screenshots, animated videos, HTML to PDF, and web scraping through one unified service. It is a free HTML to PDF API for up to 100 requests.

Key benefits include:

• All-in-one API: Screenshots, PDFs, videos, and scraping, no need for multiple libraries or services.
• Clean by default: Automatically blocks cookie pop-ups, ads, and other unwanted elements.
• Fast & Scalable: Runs on Google Cloud with a global CDN (Cloudflare) for reliable, high-speed rendering.
• Developer-Friendly: Well-documented endpoints, official SDKs, and simple API-key authentication.

In short, ScreenshotMAX is “built specifically for developers” who want high-quality PDFs without managing browser servers. You don’t have to deal with Puppeteer upgrades, OS dependencies, or runtime errors. For example, to convert a webpage to PDF with ScreenshotMAX you make one HTTP request instead of writing code.

GET https://api.screenshotmax.com/v1/pdf
?access_key=YOUR_ACCESS_KEY
&url=https://example.com/report

This single call returns the rendered PDF of the given page (or HTML). The underlying engine still uses headless Chrome, but all that complexity is hidden from you. You can configure page size, delay, and other options via query parameters or JSON payload. And because the service is managed, you get better uptime and throughput without lifting a finger.

Real-world example: generating invoice PDFs

In practice, ScreenshotMAX can handle tasks like generating PDF invoices from HTML templates. For instance, suppose your order system has an invoice URL like https://shop.example.com/order/123/invoice. You could let Puppeteer load that page and print it, but with ScreenshotMAX it’s much simpler:

curl --location 'https://api.screenshotmax.com/v1/pdf?access_key=YOUR_ACCESS_KEY&url=https://shop.example.com/order/123/invoice'
--output invoice-123.pdf

The response is a binary PDF file for invoice #123. This offloads the rendering work to ScreenshotMAX’s servers.

In fact, Puppeteer guides note that generating PDFs is perfect for things like reports or invoices. By using ScreenshotMAX, you achieve the same result “with ease”, without writing or maintaining any Puppeteer code yourself. The clean-up of cookie banners and dynamic content is done automatically, ensuring the PDF is polished and ready for your customer or records.