Generating PDFs from JSON Instead of HTML: Why Templates Are a Dead End

The HTML-to-PDF Pipeline Everyone Regrets You need to generate PDFs. Invoices, contracts, reports, certificates — the kind of documents businesses send to customers, partners, and regulators. The obvious approach is the one every team reaches for first: write an HTML template, inject data with a templating engine, render it to PDF with a headless browser. It works. For a while. Then someone adds a table that spans two pages, and the browser splits a row in half. A customer name is long enough to