web2pdf for TYPO3

Why web2pdf is indispensable for TYPO3 websites with price lists and product pages

Sales teams need printable PDFs. Customers expect a “Save as PDF” button on product pages. And industrial purchasers download price lists to forward them internally. web2pdf solves exactly this problem: the extension renders any TYPO3 page as a PDF - with correct layout, embedded images and clean typography. Instead of manually creating each page as a PDF and updating it with every change, web2pdf generates the PDF live from the current page content.

This saves not only editorial time but also prevents outdated PDF versions. When a product price is changed in the CMS, web2pdf automatically delivers the current version on the next download.

Typical use cases

Product catalogs and price lists in B2B. A mechanical engineering company maintains 200 product pages in TYPO3. The sales force needs a printable data sheet for every product. web2pdf generates a PDF from each product page with logo, technical specifications and contact information in corporate design. The editor maintains only one source - the web page - and the PDF updates automatically.

Articles and white papers as downloads. Media companies and specialist publishers offer magazine articles as PDF downloads. web2pdf converts the article including images and formatting into a print-optimized PDF. A print CSS controls which elements appear in the PDF (content) and which do not (navigation, footer, cookie banner).

Quotes and configurations. Configurator results, quote summaries or cart overviews can be exported as PDFs via web2pdf. The user clicks “Quote as PDF” and receives a print-ready document with all selected options. An automobile configurator that outputs the chosen equipment as PDF, an insurance calculator that provides the offer for download - the use cases are broad and the benefit for sales is immediately measurable.

Technical architecture

web2pdf functions as a TYPO3 extension with a frontend plugin that displays a PDF download button on each page. On click, the browser requests the same page with an additional parameter; a middleware in the extension takes the fully rendered output of that request and passes the HTML to the PHP library mPDF.

mPDF (Composer package mpdf/mpdf, version 8) comes with clear strengths and limits:

• Strengths: mPDF is pure PHP and runs inside the TYPO3 process, with no external program and no browser on the server. Headers and footers come from custom Fluid partials, page format and margins from TypoScript.
• Limits: mPDF treats every HTML element strictly as either a block or an inline element. It does not implement CSS Flexbox and Grid, and supports float and position only partially. Large tables make generation slow and memory-intensive. If you need the website layout with full CSS support (Flexbox, Grid, Custom Properties) in the PDF, there is no way around a headless browser such as Puppeteer/Chromium.

The extension is configured through TypoScript constants. Key parameters: page format (such as A4 or A3), portrait or landscape orientation, margins, custom headers and footers, output as a download or in the browser, and search-and-replace rules applied to the HTML before conversion.

A separate print CSS (@media print) controls which elements are visible in the PDF. Gosign recommends hiding navigation, footer, cookie banner and interactive elements in the print CSS and instead inserting logo, contact details and a URL reference. A well-configured print CSS makes the difference between a professional data sheet and a screenshot of the web page. Typical adjustments: font size at 11pt for print readability, page breaks before H2 headings, QR code with the source URL in the footer.

Common problems and solutions

PDF shows wrong layout, missing images or fonts. Most common cause: mPDF implements only part of CSS. Websites using Flexbox or CSS Grid look completely different in the PDF than in the browser. Solution: a separate print CSS with layouts built from blocks and tables that mPDF understands. mPDF embeds fonts from TTF files, and web2pdf ships its own font directory for this purpose. If that is not enough, the remaining option is to switch to Puppeteer outside of web2pdf.

PDF generation takes too long. web2pdf generates every PDF from scratch in the PHP process of the request, and mPDF is slow and memory-hungry on long pages with large tables. With concurrent requests, server load multiplies. Solution: implement PDF caching. The generated PDF is cached in the file system for a defined period (e.g. 60 minutes). Only when page content changes is the PDF regenerated. If memory runs short, the mPDF documentation recommends raising the PHP memory limit.

Exception when the plugin is missing from the page. If you append the PDF parameter to links yourself instead of including the extension’s plugin, you get a TYPO3 exception in the cached output, because the TypoScript setup is then not initialized. Solution according to the documentation: place the plugin on every page that is to be output as a PDF, most easily via TypoScript for all pages. Pages behind a login, on the other hand, are not a special case: the middleware converts the output of the request that the logged-in visitor makes themselves.

Migration and version compatibility

Mittwald continues to maintain web2pdf: version 4 supports TYPO3 v12.4 (since August 2023), version 5.0.1 from March 2025 supports v13.4, and older release series cover v10 and v11. There is no version for TYPO3 v14 in the TER yet (as of September 2026).

Where the PDF needs to reproduce the website layout with modern CSS, Gosign recommends an architectural shift: instead of running web2pdf as a TYPO3 extension, implement PDF generation as a separate microservice. A Node.js service with Puppeteer accepts URLs and returns PDFs. This decouples PDF generation from the TYPO3 server, reduces server load and makes the solution TYPO3-version-independent.

The migration effort from web2pdf to a Puppeteer-based solution is typically 2 to 4 days. Existing print CSS files can be reused 1:1. Only the invocation mechanism (button click, URL handling) needs adjustment.

A frequently underestimated aspect of PDF generation: accessibility. PDFs generated from HTML are not automatically accessible. For companies subject to the European Accessibility Act (EAA, effective June 2025), generated PDFs must contain tagged PDF structures. mPDF does not generate tagged PDF structures; PDF/UA support has been an open feature request in the mPDF project since 2020. For this use case, Gosign recommends a generation method that translates HTML semantics into PDF tags, for example Puppeteer, which creates tagged PDFs by default.