Dev team swaps Chromium for 1MB .NET library to generate PDFs in Azure Functions

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A software developer evaluated Bhowra.Ink, a lightweight, Chromium-free HTML-to-PDF rendering library for .NET, as an alternative to headless browser-based document pipelines. The motivation was to reduce deployment overhead, since browser-based PDF generation typically adds hundreds of megabytes of binaries, slowing build times, increasing cold starts, and expanding the security vulnerability surface. Serverless platforms like Azure Functions and AWS Lambda are particularly affected, as browser process startup time adds latency to every cold start. Bhowra.Ink is designed as a standard .NET package with no browser process, Node.js runtime, or native interop required. The developer argues the approach suits static business documents such as invoices and payslips, while acknowledging that JavaScript-heavy or SPA-rendered documents still warrant full browser-based tools like Playwright or Puppeteer.

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