Install weasyprint with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• weasyprint

Project history

WeasyPrint was created and developed by Kozea. Simon Sapin announced the first release in late 2011 after working with Kozea for several months; the PyPI timeline records version 0.1 on October 28, 2011, and Sapin's November 2, 2011 post describes it as a rendering engine for HTML and CSS that produces PDF.

The project was created to fill a gap in open-source document generation. WeasyPrint's own documentation notes that web engines had limited pagination support when the project began in 2011, while dedicated paged-media renderers such as Prince and Antenna House were powerful but not open source.

In October 2020, maintainership moved into the CourtBouillon organization. A GitHub issue titled 'The future of WeasyPrint' announced that CourtBouillon, composed of Guillaume Ayoub and Lucie Anglade, was the new organization maintaining the project. The current project website says professional support, maintenance, and community management are provided by CourtBouillon.

Adoption history

WeasyPrint's adoption has followed the broad demand for server-side document generation in web applications. Its documentation frames the main use case as automatic generation of PDFs from HTML and CSS for business and publishing documents, using technologies already familiar to web developers and designers.

The project has also matured through regular releases and sponsor-backed work. Recent changelog entries list security releases, new PDF standards work, CSS features, SVG improvements, and named sponsors and backers, showing that it is maintained as production infrastructure rather than a one-off converter.

How it is used

From the shell, users typically run the weasyprint command with an input HTML document or URL and an output PDF path. From Python, applications instantiate HTML and CSS objects and render or write PDFs programmatically.

Because WeasyPrint is focused on paged media, its value is strongest when CSS print rules, page breaks, generated content, fonts, metadata, attachments, PDF/A or electronic-invoice features, and reproducible layout matter more than JavaScript execution or browser fidelity.

Why package nerds care

WeasyPrint is package-nerd significant because it is a substantial pure-open-source renderer in a space often served by headless browsers or commercial engines. It chose the hard route of implementing layout logic for paginated output instead of wrapping a general-purpose browser engine.

It also tracks a browser-like release philosophy. The documentation warns that major versions can change rendered output, which is what matters for document generation, even when APIs remain compatible.

Timeline

• 2011-10-28: PyPI records WeasyPrint 0.1, the first release.
• 2011-11-02: Simon Sapin publishes an announcement explaining the first release and the decision not to build on WebKit or Gecko.
• 2020-10-12: CourtBouillon publicly announces that it is the new organization maintaining WeasyPrint.
• 2026-01-19: WeasyPrint 68.0 is released as a security update and refactors URL fetching APIs.
• 2026-06-02: WeasyPrint 69.0 is released as a security update and adds further CSS and PDF-related features.

Related projects

• WeasyPrint is commonly compared with wkhtmltopdf, PagedJS, Prince, Antenna House, Typeset.sh, browser print-to-PDF workflows, LaTeX, and LibreOffice-based document generation. Its Python stack includes libraries for HTML, CSS, font, image, and PDF handling rather than a full browser engine.

Sources

• https://doc.courtbouillon.org/weasyprint/stable/
• https://doc.courtbouillon.org/weasyprint/stable/changelog.html
• https://doc.courtbouillon.org/weasyprint/stable/going_further.html
• https://exyr.org/2011/weasyprint/
• https://github.com/Kozea/WeasyPrint/issues/1232
• https://pypi.org/project/weasyprint/
• https://weasyprint.org/