Show HN: PlutoPrint – Generate PDFs and PNGs from HTML with Python • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: PlutoPrint – Generate PDFs and PNGs from HTML with Python

#11

Post by masfuerte » Wed, Aug 20, 2025, 10:44 PM UTC

sammycage wrote: post #3

eterps wrote: post #2

How does it differ from https://weasyprint.org ?

WeasyPrint is great, but PlutoPrint takes a different angle: the engine is all C++, so it’s faster and lighter on memory. It can render directly to PNG as well as PDF, and has stronger SVG support.

PlutoBook looks very impressive. Is it based on another renderer?

Re: Show HN: PlutoPrint – Generate PDFs and PNGs from HTML with Python

#12

Post by richfreedman » Wed, Aug 20, 2025, 10:48 PM UTC

Nice! I think that it would be great if this could take markdown as input, without having to convert to HTML first

Re: Show HN: PlutoPrint – Generate PDFs and PNGs from HTML with Python

#13

Post by ge96 » Wed, Aug 20, 2025, 11:16 PM UTC

Might need this wkhtmltopdf being bound to bookworm

Re: Show HN: PlutoPrint – Generate PDFs and PNGs from HTML with Python

#14

Post by Humphrey » Wed, Aug 20, 2025, 11:26 PM UTC

Does anybody have any experience migrating to PlutoPrint from WeasyPrint? Is it seamless? Faster? Any teething issues? Are their reasons to stay with WeasyPrint?

Re: Show HN: PlutoPrint – Generate PDFs and PNGs from HTML with Python

#15

Post by klaxce » Wed, Aug 20, 2025, 11:46 PM UTC

ge96 wrote: post #13

Might need this wkhtmltopdf being bound to bookworm

I’m also looking at this as a replacement for wkhtmltopdf as well. I had reimplemented with Puppeteer, but it’s very ram heavy for the 200-500 page PDFs I generate. I’m hoping this renders what I need properly.

Re: Show HN: PlutoPrint – Generate PDFs and PNGs from HTML with Python

#16

Post by pac0 » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 12:16 AM UTC

Does this support full flexbox styling?

What are the known issues or the unsupported css this library has?

Re: Show HN: PlutoPrint – Generate PDFs and PNGs from HTML with Python

#17

Post by pac0 » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 12:18 AM UTC

phonon wrote: post #8

It would be great if you could run it against the tests at https://www.print-css.rocks/ They would give a much better idea of its complex printing capabilities.

It should be required to run these tests for these libraries. It's really frustrating to have to discover it trying to make it work.

Re: Show HN: PlutoPrint – Generate PDFs and PNGs from HTML with Python

#18

Post by iamgopal » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 1:24 AM UTC

Comparing it to typst ?

Re: Show HN: PlutoPrint – Generate PDFs and PNGs from HTML with Python

#19

Post by hbcondo714 » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 2:46 AM UTC

> book.load_url("input.html")

Shouldn’t this be a URL like https://example.com

Also, is there support for creating a linkable table of contents?

Re: Show HN: PlutoPrint – Generate PDFs and PNGs from HTML with Python

#20

Post by leetrout » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 3:07 AM UTC

okm wrote: post #9

This is so efficient, i just tested it ,far better than weasyprint, and it has both python and c++ repo, bro am amazed, Are you open for sponsorship?

What OS did you test on? It completely crashed my python process on mac