# WeasyPrint

5 Hacker News commenters recommended WeasyPrint and 2 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 3 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Free open-source tool that turns HTML and CSS into PDFs, with paged-media support and active maintenance; its most common caveat is slow runs.

## Why people recommend it

- Open source and actively maintained (2 comments): "WeasyPrint as a project is very much alive on Github. Filing a bug there might get your problem solved." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48314429)) "is OSS and supports CSS Paged media" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47214835))
- Works well without browser dependencies (2 comments): "works really well, and they have sample stylesheets on their website that are a good starting point" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50326777)) "does not have browser dependencies either, which is great" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47215451))

## What people warn about

- Slow on iterative builds (1 comments): "The latter step is a bit slow, so I proofread iterative content updates in the HTML." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315089))
- Fails Adobe PDF/X validation (1 comments): "then ran them through Adobe's PDF/X validator and they kept failing" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48288349))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [TinyPDF](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tinypdf.md): 6 recommend
- [Paged.js](https://hackerapproved.com/p/paged-js.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "WeasyPrint", https://hackerapproved.com/p/weasyprint/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).