Converting HTML to PDF

HTML content can render differently across browsers, devices, and viewport sizes. Converting HTML to PDF gives you a fixed output format for sharing, archiving, and printing.

Use this workflow to:

• Preserve layout and styling in a stable document format
• Distribute web content for offline access
• Archive rendered pages for audit or compliance workflows

How Nutrient supports this workflow

Nutrient .NET SDK converts HTML to PDF through a single API call. Nutrient renders the HTML through Chrome, so the PDF preserves the page layout, fonts, images, and styling.

HTML-to-PDF conversion on Linux relies on Chrome for rendering. If you run this workflow in Docker on Linux, make sure the container includes Chrome and runs as a non-root user. For the packaged Docker setup, refer to the running Chrome-based conversions in Docker guide.

You don’t need to handle:

• HTML parsing and layout
• Rendering fonts, images, and CSS styling
• Page sizing and pagination

Use the SDK API to handle the conversion in your application.

Complete implementation

The following example converts a local input.html file to PDF. This line sets up the C# application. The using directive brings in the Nutrient SDK namespace:

using Nutrient;

This line opens the HTML file. The using declaration(opens in a new tab) ensures the document is automatically closed when it goes out of scope, preventing resource leaks:

try
{
    using Document document = Document.Open("input.html");

This block exports the file to PDF and saves it as output.pdf. The try-catch block handles potential errors using NutrientException:

    document.ExportAsPdf("output.pdf");
    Console.WriteLine("Successfully converted to output.pdf");
}
catch (NutrientException e)
{
    Console.Error.WriteLine($"Error: {e.Message}");
    Environment.Exit(1);
}

Summary

The conversion has two steps:

1. Open the HTML file.
2. Export it as PDF.

Nutrient renders the HTML through Chrome and writes the result to output.pdf, so you don’t need to implement format-specific rendering logic.