Generating PDFs shouldn't be this hard in 2026

There's a moment every developer knows. You need to generate a PDF. It looks simple. You've done harder things. Three hours later, you're reading a Stack Overflow thread from 2016 that ends with "works on my machine." This post is about that moment — the actual options, what breaks in each, and where I landed after years of hitting this in production. The options are far from perfect 1, wkhtmltopdf: The Aging Classic It uses a stripped-down WebKit engine and converts HTML to PDF directly. Simple