We ended up using a service like yakpdf, for HTML to PDF generation.

It handled most of the rendering issues out of the box compared to headless browser setups.

yakpdf can handle HTML/URL to PDF conversion through an API without dealing with browser setup or headless tools.

If you ever revisit alternatives, you might want to try YakPDF It gives you:

- HTML → PDF without any browser engine - PDF compression & optimization - Simple API for manual PDF generation - Text extraction - No native dependencies and cheaper than Aspose

It’s not a full drop-in replacement for every Aspose feature, but it covers the core workflow you mentioned and is much lighter to integrate.

https://rapidapi.com/yakpdf-yakpdf/api/yakpdf (open via firefox)

YakPDF (as far as I can tell) is an API and not a library that generates a PDF. If you're going to go that route, host https://github.com/gotenberg/gotenberg yourself and call it a day.

edit: Stop spamming your own service.

Puppeteer and Playwright are the main open-source options nowadays, both solid for HTML → PDF once your print CSS is sorted. Don’t forget proper page breaks (break-before/after/inside) — e.g. break-after: page works in Chromium, while always doesn’t. For trickier pagination you can look at Paged.js, and I’d test layouts in Chrome/Edge before automating.

Shameless plug: I run yakpdf.com, a hosted Puppeteer-based service if you want to avoid self-hosting. https://rapidapi.com/yakpdf-yakpdf/api/yakpdf

Seconded. I went with C# + Playwright. I tried iTextSharp, iText, PDFSharp, and wkhtmltopdf, but they all had limitations. I had good results with Playwright in minutes, outside of tweaking the CSS like you mention.

I documented the process here[0] if anyone needs examples of the CSS and loading web fonts. Apologies for the article being long-winded – it was the first one I published.

[0] https://johnh.co/blog/creating-pdfs-from-html-using-csharp

Thirded, you can build this straight into your backend or into a microservice very easily.

You can also easily generate screenshots if that's more suitable than PDFs.

You can also easily use this to do stuff like jam a set of images into a HTML table and PDF or screenshot them in that format.

You made me realize that tractor feed roll paper would be really great for printed web pages, no page breaks! Kinda like reading scrolls of yore.