What is PDF Generation?

Thirty years later, PDFs are still critical to the modern world. While most file formats vary depending on the version and connectivity of the viewing device, PDFs act as an unchanging snapshot. While often considered PDF’s greatest weakness, it’s also the format’s greatest strength, proving a valuable tool for business, law, identity management, presentation, data visualization, and shareability between a wide range of users.

PDF’s utility leaves many wondering how to automate generating documents for many wide-ranging use-cases. After all, the only thing better than a gorgeous PDF is a gorgeous PDF that’s customized for a single, particular user.

Common use-cases include generating billing invoices, “living” whitepapers, eye-catching ebooks, event tickets, awards and certificates, and dynamic legal documents. Anything a developer can create with HTML/CSS, they can also create as a PDF, at least once you introduce headless browsers into the equation.

How can BrowserCat help with PDF generation?

For simple use-cases, BrowserCat offers an easy-as-pie PDF generation API. Just pipe your HTML/CSS/JS template and your customization data to us, and we’ll send back a multi-page PDF that looks just as good as the source looked on your local machine. Unlike some competitors who render the results to a flat image, we preserve the text and embed all required assets directly into the document.

And for more advanced use-cases, you can run custom Playwright, Puppeteer, or Selenium code on your servers, creating a websockets connection to our browser fleet with a single line of code. We’ll scale with your needs at an affordable price so that no matter the demand, your users get their documents fast.