Best cheap and easy solution for outputting a printable PDF from a website/web app?

Factual Questions
1

I’m a front-end web developer/designer. My department uses an app maintained by the printing company we use to personalize and output business cards, and they charge us a regular subscription fee. To save money, my manager wants to build something in-house to do this.

I know I can build the input and onscreen preview for this, but I don’t have much experience with printing from a web page other than simply setting up a simple print-friendly stylesheet that will output a basic but readable B&W page. I’ve googled several different solutions that have various pros and cons, like using a user agent called Prince, or pdfmaker, jsPDF, or the wonderfully-named ‘https://wkhtmltopdf.org/’. The budget is essentially $0, so something like Prince is probably out since it’s only free for non-commercial use. Other reqs:

[ul]
[li]No database needed, it only needs to be a one-and-done input info, download PDF.[/li][li]It’s not a design-your-own, there are 2 styles to choose from and then it’s only a matter of inputting name/address/phone.[/li][li]Needs to output a printable 4-color process PDF.[/li][li]I’m old-school, so I’d like to keep things to HTML/CSS/JS-jQuery. I’ve been doing Angular tutorials, so if for some reason that framework has benefits it might make a good learning project for me. But I don’t want to have to learn C# or Python or whatever.[/li][li]Budget: $0 as mentioned.[/li][/ul]

2

What is your stack? You mentioned jquery, but do you have any server-side setup at all (php, etc.?) If so, you can use ghostscript to write an API for outputting PDF. Probably all you have to do is make two PDFs by hand, one for each design, and then use ghostscript to overlay the custom text on it and export the result.

If you don’t have any sort of server side setup, it seems like jspdf or pdfkit could also get the jobs done, but you might have to import the design elements as images or recreate them as vectors.

Do you have an example output? That might help.

3

Here’s an open source project using jspdf and Angular.

You can probably adapt it to your use, or just write a form with jquery to use with jspdf.

4

Oops, the link might help!

5

Thanks Reply, that Bizcardmaker project might be just the ticket!

And as for ghostscript, that’s an interesting option too. I was starting to think along the lines of inserting form input text into an existing PDF. I don’t actually know where the web app will live yet-- as mentioned this is something my dept. is trying to do super cheap to save money. So we don’t really want to enlist the resources of the back-end Dev dept. But I could probably get it set up on something PHP-enabled.