Why would you need to convert an HTML document to PDF?

So I have to manually convert store (WooCommerce) shipping order labels from a HTML page to PDF using the Mac OS PDF print dialog PDF generator. But I've been checking out headless chrome and this Node extension https://github.com/esbenp/pdf-bot to do it. Haven't used it but it's popular and seems to work. Just haven't got the time to hack on it. So a WooCommerce extension for me would be awesome. Can you do it?

Here are two real examples from my day job:

1. A political party in Sweden wanted to create a campaign highlighting inequality. In Swedish "plan" and "plane" is the same word, so they named the campaign "plane/plan for equality". We created a site for them were people could go, create a paper plane with some words, and then download it as a PDF. The political party also received a copy, and they took all of the paper planes (thousands of them) and showered the most inequal city in Sweden with them.

2. An ecological furniture maker has made their entire product catalogue as a web based version. However, when they wanted to break into a few new markets, they discovered that they really needed a PDF - it's how the architects (or salespeople, can't remember) over there wanted their information. So we used the data on the site and created pretty stylish PDFs.

Do you have any customers for your service? How are they using it?

I work in a financial company, and we need this all the time. Whenever something is send over to clients, this needs to be in PDF, and this PDF needs to be stored in a database, along with the payload that was used to generate this PDF. (The storing part are legal requirements)

Obviously we have all sorts of internal tools and Pdf templating libraries for this. Most of these tools are hilariously outdated and a massive pain to work with.

I actually need something like this for converting social media analytics reports into PDF documents.

I'm guessing I'd need something like @jgriffith 's Browserless in addition to PDFShift?

Massive use case.

My main job is at a large, we'll call it"financial services" company as an application developer. HTML to PDF is something we use extremely heavily on almost every dashboard or quoting tool we use. We like to store the data for the pdf and generate it on the fly from an MVC template view instead of storing the pdf so that we can change the views at later times if needed.

We use iTextSharp and it works...ok.

Target financial services companies that are large enough to have a dev team. Chances are they are generating tons of pdfs. Better yet, use Facebook (or some other sophisticated ad platform with a ton of user data) and target CTO's CIO's and lead engineers/architects at financial services companies

A few years back I wanted to make a visually appealing resume that would help me stand out in a pool of job candidates. I built it in HTML, but then used Chrome's print dialog to export it to PDF to make sure that it would render consistently when people printed it.

For my day job (web dev for the media -> multimedia press releases), I get requests to convert HTML to PDF all the time, specifically from FDA pharmaceutical companies, who cannot just send out anything. Every single change made after the initial needs a PDF screenshot, which gets sent to a lawyer, who re-reads the entire thing. One wrong or misspelled word, or something that can mislead the public, can result in millions of dollars being lost because the company got sued or has to pay out for their own mistake. So these lawyers don't want to see it on a website. They want to print it out and go over it word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. This process can take months.

I currently use a Chrome extension that snapshots the page.

I frequently search for technical material on-line. Despite their disadvantages, PDF files are self-contained and almost always print well (not that I print to paper very often), unlike HTML.

I have rich text inputs that let the user stylize their documents, which then gets converted to raw encoded html and stored. That data is then combined with customer data to generate PDF forms.

Legal, as a proof that something was om some siete some time ago.

We primarily use HTML to PDF to "export" lists of influencers that brands/agencies want to send to their clients. They mostly like it compared to sharing a link to the page so that it feels more white label and custom by them

I think the best use case I can imagine that will really drive huge traffic for you is to position yourself as a book generator.

I mean help users to quickly design a web page to write their ebook and later they will be able to convert it to pdf (epub?) and sell their ebook.

The other use case may be the bloggers that would like to increase traffic by releasing a pdf (epub) version of their writings.

So you can design a simple form to get their URL and use a scraper to go through the pages and generate an ebook version of their blog...

In these days with people publishing more ebooks (white paper, pdf version of blogs), helping them design can be very helpful (and profitable)

Hope it helped

I never used in this way, but could be handy to read/save articles I want to read somewhere in the future? like articles, tutorials, documentation, etc.

At Chocolab we layout some things like Giftcards with javascript as it has better options for dynamically sizing text then Python which I’ve written most of our utility tools in. I think convert it to a PDF with a Python Library. Why does your tool need to send to your server to do the conversion?