🔗 ChromicPDF: Generating PDF/A files with Chrome, Ghostscript, and Elixir | bitcrowd blog

Programmatically generating PDF documents is a common requirement in many of our client projects at bitcrowd. While in Ruby there is a multitude of battle-proven libraries to choose from, the PDF library landscape in the Elixir/Erlang ecosystem is just beginning to evolve. Today, we introduce ChromicPDF, a fast and convenient Chrome-based HTML-to-PDF converter, written in Elixir.

Rendering business documents as PDF files is a frequent requirement in commercial software applications. At bitcrowd, we have faced this problem numerous times in various shapes, and have deployed a number of PDF generating libraries with our applications - most notably in the context of Ruby projects, where the list of such libraries is quite diverse. Recently, we were again asked to build a PDF rendering component into one of our client projects, this time an Elixir application. In order to offer a consistent and familiar interface for UI developers, we set out to generate these PDF files from HTML templates (more on this at the end of the article).