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Everything about it here →

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How to Generate PDF from HTML with Playwright using Python (Updated 2025)

Written by

Marcelo | Founder at pdf noodle

Last Updated

Aug 6, 2025

Tags

PDF Libraries

Python

What is Playwright and How Can I Use It to Convert HTML to PDF?

Playwright is a robust, open-source automation toolkit built to streamline browser interactions, including automated testing, web scraping, and generating PDFs from web content. It supports diverse browsers such as Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit, ensuring reliable rendering and consistency across environments. Its intuitive APIs and impressive speed have made it a popular choice among software developers.

For HTML-to-PDF conversion, Playwright excels at capturing precisely what is rendered by the browser. Fully supporting complex CSS styles, JavaScript-generated elements, and responsive layouts. This capability is particularly advantageous for developers building SaaS solutions where accuracy and consistency in generated PDFs like invoices or technical documentation are critical.

Playwright’s extensive documentation further simplifies troubleshooting and accelerates implementation, making it an ideal library for generating PDFs programmatically in Python.

For additional programming languages, explore our guides:

Alternative Python PDF Libraries: How Playwright Stands Out

In Python, there are multiple libraries for converting HTML to PDF, each with distinct pros and cons:

pdfkit (Python): Effective for simple PDF documents, but inadequate for complex or interactive HTML pages.
WeasyPrint: Robust CSS support but struggles with dynamic JavaScript content.
wkhtmltopdf: Powerful tool but limited modern browser feature support and challenging dependency management.
ReportLab: Excellent for structured PDF generation but lacks native HTML rendering.
xhtml2pdf: Lightweight but limited CSS and HTML5 feature support.
Pyppeteer: A Python port of Puppeteer, which can also control a browser for rendering HTML to PDF. However, Playwright offers more flexibility with multi-browser support and superior handling of dynamic content.
PyPDF2 : This is a Python library for manipulating existing PDFs. While it cannot convert HTML directly into PDF, it can be useful if you need to merge or split PDF documents after generation.

Compared to these options, Playwright uniquely combines comprehensive modern browser support, JavaScript-rendering capabilities, and high fidelity HTML-to-PDF conversion, placing it at the forefront of Python PDF libraries.

If you want to dig deeper on a comparison between playwright and other python pdf libraries, we also have a detailed article with a full comparison between the best PDF libraries for Python in 2025.

Guide to generate pdf from html using python playwright

Step 01: Setting Up Playwright for HTML to PDF Conversion in Python

First, ensure Python is installed. If not, download and install it from python.org.

Then install Playwright using pip:

The second command downloads necessary browser binaries (Chromium, Firefox, WebKit).

Step 02: Generating Your First “Hello World” PDF with Playwright Python

Creating PDFs using Playwright in Python is straightforward. Here’s a basic introductory example:

Alternative 01: Generate PDF from a URL

Here’s how to create a PDF from a live URL:

from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright

with sync_playwright() as p:
    browser = p.chromium.launch()
    page = browser.new_page()
    page.goto('https://example.com')
    page.pdf(path='example.pdf', format='A4')
    browser.close()

This script:

Opens a headless Chromium browser
Navigates to the specified URL
Generates and saves the PDF document

Alternative 02: Generate PDF from Raw HTML

If you have raw HTML content, follow this method:

from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright

html_content = """
<html>
<head><title>Sample PDF</title></head>
<body><h1>Hello, PDF!</h1></body>
</html>
"""

with sync_playwright() as p:
    browser = p.chromium.launch()
    page = browser.new_page()
    page.set_content(html_content)
    page.pdf(path='sample.pdf', format='Letter')
    browser.close()

Customizing PDF Output (Headers, Footers, Margins)

Playwright allows extensive customization options for PDF generation, including headers, footers, and margins:

page.pdf(
    path='custom.pdf',
    format='A4',
    margin={
        'top': '20mm',
        'bottom': '20mm'
    },
    header_template='<span style="font-size:12px">Header Content</span>',
    footer_template='<span style="font-size:12px">Page <span class="pageNumber"></span> of <span class="totalPages"></span></span>',
    display_header_footer=True
)

Detailed customization options can be found in the official Playwright documentation.

Using HTML Templating Engines

Dynamic content creation is simplified by templating engines such as Jinja2. Here’s an example:

from jinja2 import Template
from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright

template = Template("<h1>Invoice for {{ client }}</h1>")
rendered_html = template.render(client="ACME Corp")

with sync_playwright() as p:
    browser = p.chromium.launch()
    page = browser.new_page()
    page.set_content(rendered_html)
    page.pdf(path='invoice.pdf')
    browser.close()

Step 03: Scaling PDF Generation with Serverless Architectures

Rendering PDFs with Playwright can be resource-heavy, especially with complex content. Implementing a serverless architecture, such as AWS Lambda, offers scalability, cost efficiency, and high performance by dynamically managing resources.

Note, the browser binaries (e.g., Chromium) must be installed on your Lambda environment. Utilizing Docker containers can simplify this setup process significantly.

A detailed, step-by-step guide for configuring AWS Lambda for Playwright is available here.

import requests

url = 'https://api.pdforge.com/v1/pdf'
payload = {
    "templateId": "invoice-template",
    "data": {"client": "ACME Corp"}
}
headers = {"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"}

response = requests.post(url, json=payload, headers=headers)

with open('invoice.pdf', 'wb') as f:
    f.write(response.content)

You can create your account, experience our no-code builder and create your first layout template without any upfront payment clicking here.

If you prefer a managed service, third-party APIs like pdforge offer scalable HTML-to-PDF generation without infrastructure setup or design changes management from you. These solutions manage everything from HTML template rendering to PDF delivery.

Alternative: Convert HTML to PDF Using pdf noodle

Managing HTML-to-PDF conversion at scale can quickly become a nightmare!

Especially in serverless environments where cold starts, memory limits, and headless browser quirks love to break at the worst possible time (we even wrote a full article about it). Add constant template iterations, version control headaches, and the need to support non-technical contributors, and suddenly your “simple PDF library” turns into an ongoing engineering project.

pdf noodle eliminates all of that.

Instead of maintaining brittle infrastructure or wrestling with outdated pdf libraries, pdf noodle gives you a battle-tested PDF generation API that just works!

Fast, scalable, and designed for both developers and non-developers. You send raw HTML or use our AI-powered template builder, and pdf noodle handles the rendering, scaling, optimization, and delivery so your team doesn’t have to.

Here's an example of a simple API request to generate your pixel-perfect PDF with just a few lines of code:

import requests

url = 'https://api.pdfnoodle.com/v1/html-to-pdf/sync'
payload = {
    "html": "<html>...your-html-here",
}
headers = {"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"}

response = requests.post(url, json=payload, headers=headers)

with open('invoice.pdf', 'wb') as f:
    f.write(response.content)

pdf noodle also includes a powerful AI Agent that can generate PDF templates instantly, along with a modern editor for refining the design, also using AI, to match your brand. You don't need developing or design experience to quickly update layouts, adjust styling, and manage template versions.

Here’s a quick demo showing how it works:

You can create your account and design your first template without any upfront payment.

Conclusion

Playwright Python offers an advanced yet intuitive toolkit for generating PDFs from HTML, ensuring high-quality, pixel-perfect documents. Its growing popularity and robust feature set make it a prime choice for developers aiming to create precise, dynamic PDFs programmatically.

If you don't want to waste time maintaining pdfs layouts and their infrastructure or if you don't want to keep track of best practices to generate PDFs at scale, third-party PDF APIs like pdf noodle will save you hours of work and deliver a high quality pdf layout.

Generating pdfs can be annoying!

Let us help you make it easier while you focus on what truly matters for your company.

Generate my first PDF

Generating pdfs can be annoying!

Let us help you make it easier while you focus on what truly matters for your company.

Generate my first PDF

Generating pdfs can be annoying!

Let us help you make it easier while you focus on what truly matters for your company.

Generate my first PDF

Title

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No code or design experience needed

AI creates your template in seconds

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← blog posts

← blog posts

How to Generate PDF from HTML with Playwright using Python (Updated 2025)

Written by

Written by

Last Updated

Last Updated

Tags

Tags

PDF Libraries

PDF Libraries

Python

Python

What is Playwright and How Can I Use It to Convert HTML to PDF?

Alternative Python PDF Libraries: How Playwright Stands Out

Step 01: Setting Up Playwright for HTML to PDF Conversion in Python

Step 02: Generating Your First “Hello World” PDF with Playwright Python

Alternative 01: Generate PDF from a URL

Alternative 02: Generate PDF from Raw HTML

Customizing PDF Output (Headers, Footers, Margins)

Using HTML Templating Engines

Step 03: Scaling PDF Generation with Serverless Architectures

Alternative: Convert HTML to PDF Using pdf noodle

Conclusion

Generating pdfs can be annoying!

Generating pdfs can be annoying!

Generating pdfs can be annoying!

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