COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF PDF GENERATION TECHNOLOGIES IN WEB-ORIENTED SYSTEMS

Introduction.In modern web applications, generating high-quality PDF documents is a critical function for creating reports, portfolios, and presentation materials.The challenge lies in selecting an optimal technology that ensures document quality, generation speed, and ease of integration into web applications.Professional developers face difficulties in choosing between various approaches, each having distinct advantages and limitations in terms of performance, resource consumption, and implementation complexity.The PDF format remains the industry standard for document exchange due to its platform independence, consistent rendering across devices, and support for complex layouts.As web applications increasingly replace desktop software, the demand for server-side PDF generation has grown exponentially, making technology selection a crucial architectural decision.Problem Statement.This research focuses on comparative analysis of existing approaches to PDF generation in web environments.Three main categories of solutions are examined: HTML/CSS rendering libraries (WeasyPrint, Puppeteer), specialized PDF libraries (ReportLab, FPDF), and cloud services (DocRaptor, PDFShift).Each category represents a different philosophy in document generation, from browserbased rendering to programmatic construction and cloud-based processing.The primary research question addresses which technology provides the optimal balance of quality, performance, and maintainability for production web applications with varying scalability requirements.Research Methodology.The methodology includes comprehensive performance testing on identical document sets, memory consumption analysis under various load conditions, and evaluation of integration complexity for typical web application scenarios.Test documents ranged from simple 2-page resumes to complex 10-page portfolios with multiple images, tables, and formatting requirements.All tests were conducted on standardized server infrastructure running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with 8GB RAM and 4 CPU cores to ensure comparability of results.Each technology was tested with 100 iterations to obtain statistically significant performance metrics.The evaluation criteria included generation speed, memory footprint, CPU utilization, output quality assessment, and developer experience based on implementation time and code complexity.