[maegul]

Are there good deep dives on how far you can practically this? Especially in combination with headless browser pdf generation?

Last time I looked into it, a while ago, my impression was that it would get rickety too soon. It’d be a good place to be, I think, if web and “document” tech stacks could have nice and practical convergence.

[Semaphor]

We use CSS paged media to create e-books and invoices (using weasyprint [0]). One of the most helpful resources for me was print-css.rocks [1], they cover a lot of what’s possible and include which tools support which parts of it (tools targeting paged media, browser support is essentially non-existent and outside using JS to fake it with paged.js, not relevant). The expensive tools tend to support more features, but thanks to some donations/sponsorships, weasyprint has really caught up and now supports a very large part of the spec.

> Especially in combination with headless browser pdf generation

I have no idea why you’d want to do that. Browsers are bad at it, dedicated tools are great at it.

[0]: https://weasyprint.org/

[1]: https://print-css.rocks/

[2]: https://pagedjs.org/

[maegul]

> I have no idea why you’d want to do that. Browsers are bad at it, dedicated tools are great at it.

Fair! I was just aspiring to a place where web pages and documents converge more.

Thanks for the recommendations!

[p4bl0]

I'd say it's already there. See for example the https://pagedjs.org/ project which allows advanced typesetting (including for printing) using web technologies. It is already used in production by at least one book publisher (C&F editions)

[throwanem]

I've used it for my own such production, perfect binding with a hand guillotine and screw clamps in my attic - nothing remotely professional, but you still have to start by making a book block, and Paged.js is a solid call there. Unless beauty of typography (more than TTF/OTF hinting can handle) is of particular merit, it's usually my preferred first typesetting option.

As an old hand with PDF-in-browser production, I expected much worse of Paged.js than I found. It's powerful and mostly enjoyable to use! Oh, you end up with a large set of CSS rules, and it is not without bugs and gotchas (failing to specify a bleed rule somewhere at least once in every @page context subtly breaks layout; footnote layout is functional but automatic call numbering isn't always perfect, etc.)

You should definitely not expect to take Paged.js out of the box, slap a theme on it, and go; it comes as a box of parts with a mostly complete machine inside, and if it breaks you get to keep all the pieces. I imagine the publisher who uses it must have some prior interest in web technologies, for example.

Nor is Paged.js remotely as capable or flexible as InDesign or a comparable tool, especially for the deeply rudimentary condition of web typography overall - something even as elaborate a tool as this can't really approach fixing.

But Paged.js is also unlike InDesign in having a much shallower (days vs months) learning curve for folks like us with prior web experience, and however equivocal a review I may now be giving of its technical merits, I do actually like working with Paged.js quite a lot.

[jvns]

I pay for a tool to convert HTML/CSS into PDFs https://www.princexml.com/ and it seems to work well. I don't have the best idea of how it compares to the various free options though.