Server-Side PDF Rendering Service (R&D)

Overview

An R&D project exploring server-side rendering of web content to PDF. It contains parallel builds, a Vite-based Node server, a Vike SSR app, and a Python pipeline, to compare approaches for generating documents from rendered HTML.

Why It Exists

Producing pixel-accurate PDFs from rich, dynamic web layouts is a recurring need behind document-generation products. This project evaluated how best to render React/HTML on the server and emit a PDF, rather than relying on the browser or client-side libraries alone.

What We Built

Three side-by-side tracks under one repo: a vite-project with a custom server.js for server-side rendering, a vike-test-2 app using the Vike SSR framework (with renderer, server and pages directories), and a py3 Python pipeline with input/output folders and a main.py driver. The structure reflects a deliberate comparison of Node-SSR vs. framework-SSR vs. a Python-based path for the HTML-to-PDF problem.

Technologies & Approach

Vite and a hand-rolled Node SSR server for one track; the Vike meta-framework for structured SSR in another; Python for a third, file-in/file-out pipeline. Running them in parallel let us weigh fidelity, performance and operational simplicity before committing to a production approach.

Outcome / Impact

A focused comparison that de-risked the server-side PDF rendering approach used across the studio’s document-generation work, clarifying the trade-offs between framework SSR and a custom rendering server.

Capabilities Demonstrated

• Server-side rendering of web pages to PDF
• Evaluating SSR frameworks (Vike) vs. custom Node servers
• Cross-stack (Node + Python) document pipeline design