Show HN: Htmldocs – Typeset and generate pdfs with HTML/CSS

226 points by kelvinzhang - 471 Days, 14 Hours ago Hacker News

htmldocs is an Overleaf-style editor for typesetting documents using HTML/CSS, which provides the same benefits as LaTeX while being more accessible, customizable, and familiar.

I built this because I wanted to programatically generate invoices as well as automatically tailor my resume to jobs but had no good way of generating well-formatted PDFs. I ended up building a templating engine to Chromium rendering pipeline to generate PDFs, and due to the amount of engineering effort, turned it into a tool for others that might want to do the same. There's a built-in API (https://htmldocs.com/docs/documents) that you can call to turn JSON into PDFs in a single call.

htmldocs is different from other tools like Wkhtmltopdf and Weasyprint in that it uses Chromium to generate PDFs, meaning that it supports the most modern CSS features and there's minimal drift between the rendered HTML document and PDF.

Will also consider open sourcing if there's enough interest in the project!