Freek Van der Herten: Introducing Browsershot v3: the best way to convert html to PDFs and images

In a new post to his site Freek Van der Herten has an announcement about the release of the latest stable version of the "Browsershot" package, version 3.

To convert html to a pdf or an image using wkhtmltopdf and wkhtmltoimage tends to be the popular option. Unfortunately those tools contain an outdated browser engine to do their thing, so you can’t use any newish css syntax. A while ago Google added a headless mode to Chrome. They’ve also released a javascript library called Puppeteer that gives you programmatic and fine grained control over Chrome.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could just use Chrome and Puppeteer to convert html to PDFs and images? Browsershot is package that does exactly that. In this post I’d like to introduce v3 of Browsershot, which was recently released.

He starts with some basic usage of the package, taking screenshots of example URLs and saving them locally as PDFs. Version 3 now has integration with Puppeteer to perform more complex logic on what parts of the page should be captured and how it should be saved. There's examples of this and a look behind the scenes at what the package is doing with the page grabs are called.