While working on one of our projects my colleague Sebastian had to create a pdf with some text and charts. In a new post on his blog he explains how he leveraged headless Chrome to create the pdf.

This week I needed to export some charts generated with HTML & JavaScript as a pdf file. I already had implemented the charts on a webpage so I wanted a solution that allowed me to use my existing code for the pdfs.

Headless Chrome to the rescue! Chrome can run as a cli tool, and print a pdf file from a url. Al I had to do was make some layout tweaks to make everything printer-friendly.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2017/generate-pdfs-with-google-chrome-on-a-forge-provisioned-server

Meanwhile support for creating pdfs has been added to our Browsershot package (which also uses headless Chrome under the hood).

Here's how you can convert a webpage to a pdf using the package:

Browsershot::url('https://example.com')->save('example.pdf');