jsPDF is the veteran of frontend PDF generation — huge documentation, a mature ecosystem, and a decade of Stack Overflow answers. dompdf.js is the newcomer, built around a simple idea: give it HTML, get back a vector PDF. Developers evaluating the two often get stuck between familiarity and efficiency. The familiar library demands manual coordinate math for everything; the new one promises that knowing HTML is enough. This article compares the two libraries across rendering principles, Chinese font support, pagination and tables, performance and file size, and learning cost, with a side-by-side code example and a full feature comparison table. It closes with a decision guide for different project types, so you can choose once, correctly, instead of discovering the wrong fit halfway through a project. Whether you are maintaining a legacy codebase or starting something new, this comparison gives you an evidence-based way to decide rather than picking a side on instinct. The comparison deliberately avoids benchmark theater: the numbers cited are reproducible with a demo page, and the qualitative claims can be verified by exporting the same document through both libraries. Use the decision guide at the end as a checklist for your own project's constraints, and treat the code samples as the starting point for your own spike.
jsPDF is a low-level PDF drawing library. It exposes commands like text, line, rect, and addImage so you can paint PDF content the way you would paint on a canvas. Every coordinate, line break, and page boundary is calculated by your code — the library does exactly what you tell it and nothing more, with no intelligent layout of its own.
dompdf.js is an HTML rendering engine. You hand it an HTML string or a live DOM node, and it takes responsibility for parsing the markup, computing layout, paginating content, and producing a finished PDF. Your code never touches coordinates because there are none to touch, which makes the learning curve dramatically shorter.
That positioning difference dictates usage. jsPDF fits programmatic generation of fixed-layout documents: labels, forms, tickets, barcodes. dompdf.js fits converting existing web content — reports, invoices, contracts, dashboards — into PDFs. They address different problem domains, and comparing them fairly means acknowledging that; forcing either library into the wrong role is painful in both directions.
One more ecosystem consideration: jsPDF's addHTML path, which is based on html2canvas, is officially labeled experimental and receives limited maintenance attention. Projects that depend on it frequently see behavior changes when upgrading jsPDF major versions — a hidden risk worth factoring into any long-term decision.
The positioning difference also shapes how teams grow. A jsPDF codebase accumulates coordinate constants, margin helpers, and font-registration utilities that every new developer must learn; a dompdf.js codebase looks like ordinary HTML templates that anyone who knows markup can read and edit. For teams with mixed skill levels, the readability of the codebase is a real cost difference, not a matter of taste.
There is also a maintenance asymmetry in how the two libraries age. jsPDF's low-level API changes slowly and safely, but all the layout intelligence lives in your code, so every design iteration is your work. dompdf.js moves layout intelligence into the engine, which means the library's improvements over time benefit every document you already ship — upgrades are where the value compounds.
It is also worth checking how each library handles the documents you actually produce. jsPDF shines on one-off fixed layouts, but its HTML conversion path, which is based on html2canvas, is experimental and produces bitmap output; dompdf.js handles HTML as its native input. If the majority of your documents are web pages converted to PDF, the native-input library has a structural advantage that no amount of wrapper code closes.
It is important to be precise here. jsPDF's hand-written API outputs vector text, and that part is fine. The trouble starts when developers use jsPDF to convert HTML: the common path goes through html2canvas and addImage, which screenshots the page into a bitmap and embeds that picture into the PDF. Text becomes pixels — unselectable, unsearchable, and visibly blurry beyond 200% zoom.
dompdf.js never takes a screenshot. Its Rust+WASM core parses the DOM and emits PDF drawing instructions directly, so text is written as vector glyph outlines. The text is selectable, searchable, and copyable, and it stays razor-sharp at any zoom level or print resolution, which is the most fundamental difference in output quality between the two libraries.
The consequences show up in the details. Bitmap PDFs grow roughly with the square of the page area: one A4 page as an image can easily weigh several megabytes. A vector PDF of the same content is typically tens to hundreds of kilobytes. For email attachments and long-term storage, that difference is not cosmetic — it is operational, and it compounds as document volume grows.
To be fair, for simple text-only exports with no complex styling, the blurriness of the bitmap path rarely matters and jsPDF is perfectly adequate. The quality gap becomes decisive precisely in the real-world scenarios that matter: mixed image-and-text layouts, tables, and long documents — exactly where dompdf.js excels.
The vector-versus-bitmap difference also affects downstream systems, not just human readers. Search engines, document management systems, and e-discovery tools index PDF text; a bitmap PDF is invisible to all of them. For any document that will be archived, searched, or processed automatically, vector text is effectively a requirement, and the choice of rendering pipeline decides it up front.
Zoom behavior is the test most people can run without any tooling: open the exported file, zoom to 300 percent, and look at a table border or a line of small text. The bitmap path shows soft, smeared edges; the vector path stays hairline-crisp. It takes thirty seconds to run and settles the quality argument with evidence rather than opinion.
File size also affects version control and collaboration. Bitmap PDFs are opaque binaries that blow up repository sizes and resist diffing, while vector PDFs remain small enough to store alongside source documents. For teams that keep generated documents in Git or shared drives, the size difference translates into storage costs and workflow friction that accumulate over years.
// ---- Option 1: jsPDF, manual coordinates ----
import { jsPDF } from 'jspdf';
const doc = new jsPDF();
doc.text('Sales Report', 105, 20, { align: 'center' });
doc.setFontSize(10);
doc.text('East China', 20, 40);
doc.text('$182,500', 60, 40);
doc.line(20, 45, 90, 45); // draw the table line by hand
// Every row means more coordinates, lines, and alignment math
// Chinese text additionally requires addFileToVFS + addFont + a TTF file
doc.save('jspdf-report.pdf');
// ---- Option 2: dompdf.js, render the HTML ----
import { DomPDF } from 'dompdf.js';
const pdf = new DomPDF();
pdf.addPage(`
<h1 style="text-align:center">Sales Report</h1>
<table style="width:100%;border-collapse:collapse">
<tr><th style="border:1px solid #000;padding:8px">Region</th>
<th style="border:1px solid #000;padding:8px">Sales</th></tr>
<tr><td style="border:1px solid #000;padding:8px">East China</td>
<td style="border:1px solid #000;padding:8px">$182,500</td></tr>
</table>`, { format: 'A4' });
pdf.save('dompdf-report.pdf');
// Table, borders, and alignment are handled automatically, CJK included| Dimension | jsPDF | dompdf.js |
|:---|:---|:---|
| Input | Manual coordinate API | HTML / DOM rendering |
| Output type | Vector when hand-drawn; bitmap via HTML path | Vector end to end |
| Sharpness at 200% zoom | Blurry on HTML path | Crisp |
| Chinese support | Manual TTF registration | Bundled Source Han Sans SC |
| Auto pagination | Manual height calculation | CSS-driven, automatic |
| Table borders | Drawn by hand | Rendered automatically |
| Learning curve | High (coordinate thinking) | Low (HTML knowledge is enough) |
| File size | Large on bitmap path | Small (vector) |
| Best for | Simple forms, labels | Reports, invoices, contracts, full pages |On rendering speed, dompdf.js's WASM core finishes roughly a thousand pages in about two seconds in browser benchmarks. jsPDF's HTML path screenshots and encodes every page, so cost grows with page area and large documents visibly stutter; the html2canvas step alone can dominate the total time on long pages.
File size tells the same story from the other direction. A 10-page text report exported by dompdf.js usually lands under 100KB. The same report through jsPDF's bitmap path can reach 5-10MB — a heavy burden for email, storage, and transfer on mobile connections, and a very different download experience for the end user.
Fairness requires the caveat that jsPDF's hand-drawn path is also vector and small. The trade-off is developer time: every table, header, and page break costs manual code, and every later layout change means recomputing coordinates. dompdf.js gives you vector quality and small files and HTML input at the same time — the combination that most projects actually want.
You can quantify the development cost: a report with a 20-row data table typically takes over a hundred lines of coordinate code with jsPDF, while dompdf.js just needs the HTML template written once. The gap in code volume and maintenance effort grows with project scope, which is a decisive factor for teams shipping many different document types.
Memory behavior differs in ways that matter on real devices. The bitmap path allocates a full-resolution canvas per page, so a long document's memory profile climbs steeply and can end in a crash on low-end hardware; the vector pipeline keeps peak memory comparatively flat. Teams supporting older laptops or tablets see the difference as a stability gap rather than a performance nicety.
There is also the network dimension: a multi-megabyte PDF is slow to upload, slow to download, and slow to open in email clients that preview attachments. When exports are distributed by email or stored in cloud drives, file size quietly becomes a user-experience factor that no feature can compensate for.
Concurrency is another angle: because dompdf.js runs in WebAssembly inside the browser, generation can be kicked off from a Web Worker or triggered on demand without server round-trips, which keeps interactive features snappy. Both libraries run client-side, so server costs are avoided either way — the difference is in how much work your code does per document, and that workload is what dominates long-term maintenance.
For a quick quantitative check, export the same 10-page report through both libraries and compare three numbers: generation time, file size, and the line count of the export code. In most evaluations the dompdf.js side wins all three for HTML-driven documents, which turns the comparison from a debate into a measurement.
If your requirement is simple fixed-layout content — tickets, labels, barcodes, basic forms — jsPDF's manual API is perfectly adequate, its ecosystem is mature, and community answers are easy to find. There is no reason to switch for those use cases; stability wins.
If your requirement is converting complex HTML pages — reports, invoices, contracts, resumes — into PDFs, dompdf.js is the stronger choice. Development cost drops by an order of magnitude, output quality is higher, and Chinese support and pagination work out of the box, with maintenance costs that stay low over time.
A hybrid is possible: keep jsPDF for programmatic drawing and use dompdf.js for whole-page exports. But unless a legacy codebase forces it, new projects should prototype with dompdf.js first. Build a demo page, export a real document, and evaluate the output with your own eyes before committing — real output beats any comparison article.
If your team already has a mature jsPDF wrapper, assess whether it is thin or thick before migrating: a thick wrapper means more change points, a dedicated schedule, and generous testing time. And if your product is a low-code platform or form engine, dompdf.js's HTML input fits naturally, since the form description is already HTML.
Two more scenarios deserve explicit advice. If you are building a document generator that must produce hundreds of different templates — think contract platforms, report builders, or e-commerce order systems — dompdf.js's HTML-driven model keeps the template count manageable because every template is just HTML. If you are building a drawing tool or a label printer with pixel-perfect programmatic output, jsPDF's coordinates are exactly what you want, and the manual work is justified.
Finally, involve the people who will maintain the feature in the decision. A library choice that saves two weeks now but confuses every future contributor is a bad trade; one that makes the next developer productive on day one pays for itself repeatedly. Run a small spike with both libraries, let the team read both codebases, and choose the one they would rather maintain.
And a note on timing: if your team is mid-project with jsPDF and the pain is already real, the migration cost only grows. The HTML templates you would write for dompdf.js are also useful documentation of the document structure, so the migration investment pays off beyond the library swap itself.
下面的按钮用 dompdf.js 在浏览器端实时生成 PDF，无需后端：
这是由 dompdf.js 渲染的示例 PDF 内容。