Stop Fighting with PDF Libraries: Generate Dynamic PDFs Using HTML & JSON

Generating PDFs in a web application is a task that almost every developer dreads. Whether it’s an invoice, a shipping label, or an event ticket, we usually find ourselves stuck between two extremes: Old-school libraries (mPDF, iText, etc.): These often feel like coding in the 90s. No Flexbox, no Grid, and very limited CSS support. Headless Browsers (Puppeteer/Playwright): They work great, but managing a headless Chromium instance in production is a DevOps nightmare. It’s memory-heavy, hard to scale, and slow to set up. I wanted a middle ground. Something that lets me design with modern CSS and populate data with a simple JSON call. That’s why I built HookPDF. The Problem: Decoupling Design from Logic In most projects, your PDF design shouldn't be hardcoded into your backend logic. If you want to change the color of a button or the font size of a header, you shouldn't have to redeploy your entire API. The ideal workflow should look like this: Design: Create a template using HTML/CSS. D