[styx31]

Webpages and pdf (paged documents) are fundamentally different, you won't be able to support easily headers and footers, page-breaks and orphans on a webpage. You can create basic invoices on webpages, but anything more complex (and by that I mean any serious word document) will require you to twist HTML. Try to have column headers to repeat on each printed page on a HTML page.

[aidos]

The markup doesn’t need to be html - and would be better not to be. The point is more that templating languages are great for formatting data as markup and markup is great for driving layout. With this library as a backend you can make something super usable.

[SigmundA]

I believe browsers have been repeating table headers on printed output for some time.

Page media CSS is designed for this although most browsers don't fully support it, PrinceXML is the go to for full paged media support.

IMO they are not fundamentally different, they are both document formats, PDF just a has fixed paged rendering layout baked in while HTML can flow and adjust to rendering target. The main issue is lack of full print CSS support in HTML rendering engines.

https://www.w3.org/TR/css-page-3/

https://www.princexml.com

[styx31]

You are right about the thead repeatable header.

Still, to switch back to the previous point, it seems it's more a divergence between using markup or code to design a document. Both have valid usage and benefits depending on your case.

In my case and my apps, I often need to handle complex conditions that fits better imo in procedural code (complex invoices and agreements). On other cases (reports), I prefer to use a markup language.

[lazyeye]

None of these things are difficult at all with html. Plus you have the benefit of having the document viewable in a web browser too. You use the exact same html layout for both with specific css (heights, widths mainly) for each.