PDF export

What the renderer needs, which hosts already have it, and the fallback that produces the same document where they do not.

Server-side PDF rendering needs a Chromium on the machine and a Times-metric serif font. Where both are present, the PDF button in the resume editor downloads the file and export_resume_pdf returns a download link plus the page count it actually came out to.

Host	One-click PDF
Docker / Compose	Yes. The image ships the browser and the fonts.
Railway (Nixpacks)	No. Use the print-view fallback below.
Your own machine	Depends on whether a Chromium is installed.

The fallback

Where the browser is missing, the PDF button says so rather than failing silently, and export_resume_pdf reports the same thing. The fallback produces an identical document:

1. Open the print view

   In the resume editor: ⋯ → Open print view. It is a US-Letter page at /print/<id>, and it is auth-gated like the rest of the app.

2. Save as PDF

   Your browser’s print dialog → Save as PDF, with margins set to None. The page already carries the template’s own half-inch margins.

Same document, one more step. The output is real selectable text either way, which is what matters for an applicant tracking system reading it.

Getting one-click export on a host without it

The renderer checks these paths in order, and uses the first one that exists:

1. PDF_CHROMIUM_PATH
2. PLAYWRIGHT_CHROMIUM_EXECUTABLE_PATH
3. /usr/bin/chromium
4. /usr/bin/chromium-browser
5. /usr/bin/google-chrome
6. /usr/bin/google-chrome-stable
7. /opt/pw-browsers/chromium/chrome-linux/chrome
8. /root/.cache/ms-playwright/chromium/chrome-linux/chrome

Then Playwright’s own versioned layout under PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH or /root/.cache/ms-playwright.

So on a host where you control the image, installing chromium, fonts-croscore and fonts-liberation is usually enough, with PDF_CHROMIUM_PATH pointed at the browser if it lands somewhere unusual.

On Railway specifically, a Dockerfile installing those three packages does produce a working renderer — but Railway’s healthcheck did not come up on the resulting container, so it is not the shipped default. If you want one-click PDF and do not want to solve that, deploy with Compose instead.

PDF_CHROMIUM_PATH is the narrow exception to the one-variable rule: it is a machine-level fact about the host that the app cannot discover, it is never required, and self-hosting still needs only DATABASE_URL.

Why the output looks the same everywhere

No webfont is fetched. The serif stack is Tinos → Times New Roman → Liberation Serif, which are metrically identical, so the document renders the same on macOS, Windows and Linux with nothing to download and nothing to expire.

The page is exactly 8.5in × 11in with the template’s own margins, and the renderer is the same component the editor’s live preview and the published page use — so what you see in the editor is what comes out of the file.