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 Python 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.

Import the required Nutrient classes:

from nutrient_sdk import Document
from nutrient_sdk import NutrientException

Then open the HTML file with a Python context manager(opens in a new tab). The context manager closes the document automatically:

def main():
    try:
        with Document.open("input.html") as document:

Export the file to PDF and handle conversion errors with NutrientException:

            document.export_as_pdf("output.pdf")
            print("Successfully converted to output.pdf")
    except NutrientException as e:
        print(f"Error: {e}")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

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.

To run the example locally, download the sample package.