Last year I made a decision I slightly regret: I promised PDF downloads for every security guide on my site. At the time I had around 400 articles. By the time I finished building the pipeline, I had over 1,600. I am not proud of everything I wrote to make this work, but it works reliably in production and I learned a lot along the way.
Why WeasyPrint
I looked at several options: Puppeteer (Node, I wanted to avoid it), wkhtmltopdf (abandoned, known rendering issues), and WeasyPrint. WeasyPrint is a Python library that converts HTML/CSS to PDF using CSS Pint and Cairo under the hood. It is not the fastest, but it respects CSS print media queries, handles Unicode properly, and does not require a browser binary with a display server.
For a cybersecurity consulting site generating PDFs from server-rendered HTML, that tradeoff was acceptable.
The basic pipeline
