Generating a nicely formatted PDF is surprisingly hard with traditional .NET libraries. Pixel‑perfect layout often requires low‑level drawing APIs or proprietary tooling.
When looking for a solution, I stumbled upon Microsoft Playwright, a library for end-to-end testing in the browser.
This in itself might not sound like a good fit for PDF generation, but if you know that the print preview inside a Chromium browser is actually a rendered PDF, it makes more sense.
So if we can render HTML in a browser, we can also export it to PDF. And this gives us all the flexibility of HTML and CSS for layout, without the hassle of low-level drawing APIs.
For this article, we will create a simple .NET console application that generates a PDF from an HTML template using Playwright. Playwright integration is not limited to .NET, there are also libraries for JavaScript, Python, and Java, so you can use it in your preferred language.
1. Add Playwright to the application
Start by adding the Microsoft.Playwright package.
After restoring packages run the Playwright CLI to download the required browsers.
The smallest installation is Chromium with only the shell dependencies, which is sufficient for PDF generation:
.\bin\Debug\net9.0\playwright.ps1 install chromium --with-deps --only-shellWith the dependencies in place you can launch Chromium in headless mode:
using Microsoft.Playwright;
// Create an instance of Playwrightusing var playwright = await Playwright.CreateAsync();
// Launch a Chromium browser instanceawait using var browser = await playwright.Chromium.LaunchAsync();2. Create an HTML template with placeholders
Create a template that contains placeholders for the dynamic parts.
The demo project ships with html-template.html embedded as a resource.
It also shows how the CSS page rules can be used to set the page size, margins, and headers/footers:
<!DOCTYPE html><html lang="en"><head> <meta charset="utf-8" /> <title>{{title}}</title> <style> @page { size: A4; margin: 2cm; @top-center { content: "Page Header"; } @bottom-right { content: counter(page) " of " counter(pages); } } </style></head><body> <h1>PDF Generation Demo</h1> <p>{{body}}</p> <p><address>https://blog.hompus.nl</address></p></body></html>3. Replace placeholders at runtime
Load the template and swap the placeholders for real values before rendering. To keep things simple, we’ll generate some random body text with a Lorem Ipsum library:
// Create a temporary directory to store the generated filesvar tempDir = Directory.CreateTempSubdirectory("pdfs_");// Define the path for the HTML file that will be used as input for the PDFvar outputPath = Path.Combine(tempDir.FullName, "pdf-input.html");
// Load the embedded HTML template resource from the assemblyusing var stream = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetManifestResourceStream("CreatePdfs.Playwright.html-template.html");
// Read the HTML template into a byte bufferSpan<byte> buffer = new byte[stream.Length];stream.ReadExactly(buffer);
// Convert the byte buffer to a UTF-8 stringvar templateHtml = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(buffer);
// Generate placeholder content for the body using Lorem.NETCore// Settings: Generate 20 paragraphs with between 3 and 8 sentences per paragraph, and between 8 and 10 words per sentence.var generatedBody = string.Join("</p><p>", LoremNETCore.Generate.Paragraphs(8, 20, 3, 8, 20));
// Replace placeholders in the HTML template with actual contentusing var outputFile = File.CreateText(outputPath);outputFile.Write(templateHtml! .Replace("{{title}}", "Hello, World!") // Replace the title placeholder .Replace("{{body}}", generatedBody) // Replace the body placeholder with generated content);outputFile.Close();4. Generate the PDF
Finally instruct Playwright to navigate to the generated HTML file and export a PDF:
// The output path for the generated PDF filevar pdfPath = outputPath.Replace(".html", ".pdf");
// Create a new browser pagevar page = await browser.NewPageAsync();
// Navigate to the generated HTML fileawait page.GotoAsync(outputPath); // The browser can load files from the local file system
// Generate a PDF from the HTML contentawait page.PdfAsync(new PagePdfOptions{ DisplayHeaderFooter = true, // Enable header and footer in the PDF Landscape = false, // Use portrait orientation PreferCSSPageSize = true, // Use CSS-defined page size Tagged = true, // Enable tagged PDF for accessibility (e.g., helps screen readers navigate) Path = pdfPath, // Define the output path for the PDF Outline = true, // Include an outline (bookmarks) in the PDF});The resulting file can be saved, returned from an API or just opened. The complete example project is available on GitHub.
Notes and next steps
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Background jobs – The same code runs perfectly in a background worker like Hangfire, letting you offload PDF generation from the request pipeline.
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Fonts and styling – Any font that the browser can render can be embedded via CSS. Add
@font-facerules and Playwright will include the fonts in the PDF. Just remember that fonts might not be available in a container, so to be safe, add the font aswofffiles to your project and reference them in the CSS.@font-face {font-family: 'Open Sans';src: url('/fonts/OpenSans.woff') format('woff');}body { font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; }
Playwright may not be the first tool you think of for PDF generation, but it gives you a full browser engine and a flexible API.
It turns out the best PDF library is… a browser pretending it’s a printer.