Generating invoice PDFs is a common requirement for web applications – whether for e-commerce, SaaS billing, or financial reporting. Puppeteer, a powerful headless browser automation tool for Node.js, makes it easy to convert HTML into high-quality PDFs. In this guide, we’ll walk you through setting up Puppeteer, designing an invoice with HTML and CSS, and generating a professional PDF.
Generating PDFs has become a crucial feature for many modern web applications, from creating invoices to producing complex data-driven reports. Over the years, various HTML to PDF tools have emerged, each with its own approach and capabilities. In this post, we’ll take a brief look at the evolution of PDF generation solutions – from wkhtmltopdf and PrinceXML (via DocRaptor) to Puppeteer and Playwright – and then walk through a short tutorial on using Playwright (Node.js) to generate a sample PDF in 2025.