Prince
HTML and CSS typesetting engine that produces print-quality PDF, books included.
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Operated by YesLogic Pty. Ltd.
Where your files are processed
No server involved
A program you install and run yourself. It reads HTML and CSS from local storage or a URL you choose and writes the PDF locally; YesLogic operates no processing service in the path. That is a property of the library itself: what an application built with it does with your file depends on that application, not on this.
A program you install and run on your own machine or server. The HTML, CSS and any images are read from local storage or a URL you configure, and the PDF is written locally; YesLogic operates no processing service in the path.
What it does
Prince takes HTML and CSS and produces a PDF designed for print rather than for a screen: page numbers, running headers and footers, footnotes, cross-references, duplex layouts, columns and floats, with fonts embedded and subsetted and CJK and right-to-left scripts handled properly. It has been the tool behind a lot of published material for two decades, and it is driven from the command line with wrapper libraries for Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby on Rails and Node.js. A separate branch, Prince for Books, targets the pagination and hyphenation quality book publishers need.
Best for: Publishers and documentation teams who already write in HTML and CSS and want the same source to produce a properly typeset PDF, and anyone producing long, structured documents — books, reports, statements, manuals — where browser print output is not good enough. It is the most typesetting-oriented tool in this index.
Worth knowing: The free licence is narrower than it sounds, and the terms are explicit. There is a Non-commercial licence, but it is defined tightly: no fees, no part in a monetary transaction system — invoices and receipts are named — and no other income such as subscriptions or advertising. So a small business that wants to generate its own invoices is not covered, which is the most common reason somebody reaches for an engine like this. The free tier is also notice-bearing: generated PDFs include notices identifying the software, they may not be removed, and if documents are generated routinely the licence requires a prominent link to the vendor's site on the pages they are fetched from and in the email body when they are sent as attachments. It is also a closed engine, so CSS support is whatever the vendor implemented rather than whatever a browser does, and the differences appear in exactly the places that matter for print — page breaks, widows and orphans, floats. The supported operating systems are listed on the version specific download page rather than on this profile, and we did not read them there. That is a gap in our reading rather than a limitation of the product. Version 17 shipped in September 2026, and the vendor’s download page also offers prerelease builds carrying fixes and improvements, so stable and prerelease support are different tracks rather than one cadence with a long wait.
Details, and where each comes from
Vendor statements, our own reading of their pages, and the things nobody has established yet, each answered separately. Where we have not confirmed something it says so rather than guessing, and a row nobody has established is greyed out.
- Versions covered
- Self-hosted
- Website
- princexml.com
- Requires an account
- Not applicable
- Free tier
- Yes
- Watermark on the free tier
- Not verified
- Maximum file size
- Not verified
- Batch processing
- Yes
- Data residency
- Self-hosted
- Open source
- No
- Self-hostable
- Yes
- Licence
- Proprietary, in tiers: Non-commercial (free, notice-bearing and limited to non-transactional documents), Desktop, Server, Academic Server, and separate agreements for OEM, Commercial Service Offerings and Commercial Site licences
- Redaction
- No redaction feature
- Programmatic access
- Command line · Embeddable library
- Last availability check
- Responded in 243 ms 16 October 2026
Checked automatically by our own runner, not reported by the vendor. 100% of our last 30 checks got a response.
What the redaction verdict rests on
From the vendor's own documentation, read 22 September 2026. Not tested by us.
“It's quick and simple to convert HTML to PDF with Prince. HTML is seamlessly transformed into documents you can print, download and archive.”
What that does not establish: Recorded as `none` on absence, and this one is structural rather than a judgement about a feature list: Prince is a generator. It builds a PDF from HTML and CSS and has no notion of an existing document to edit, so there is nothing for a redaction feature to operate on. Its output hardening is encryption and document security, which is a different thing from removing content. What it does not establish: that a PDF produced by Prince is free of whatever the source HTML contained — a template that prints a field will print it, and a generator writes what it is told to write.
What the vendor says
Claims are labelled rather than repeated as fact. Where we have checked something ourselves, it says so and shows when. Checked means we read the vendor's own page and it says what we recorded — not that we tested the behaviour, unless the note says we did.
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“It's quick and simple to convert HTML to PDF with Prince. HTML is seamlessly transformed into documents you can print, download and archive.”
Checked by us — the source says this Read 1 October 2026
Confirmed. The quoted text appears in the rendered page as read on 2026-10-01. This claim was carried as reported rather than checked until this read.
Standing: Not re-read against the live source
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- 68ff24b96ca831b143fd4ebef159475035a4c3934803251b5783ca2f5d669dd0
How we checked: Read as rendered text in headless Chrome on 2026-10-01 and saved to the evidence archive, so the read can be repeated against the same file. Comparison ignores case, punctuation and hyphenation, which is why "open-source" on the record matches "open source" on the page.
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“Prince for Books is a separate branch of Prince that aims to achieve the quality of pagination and hyphenation required by book publishers.”
Checked by us — the source says this Read 1 October 2026
Confirmed. The quoted text appears in the rendered page as read on 2026-10-01. This claim was carried as reported rather than checked until this read.
Standing: Not re-read against the live source
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- 7eb239f2db1c9db458e9a0c8769c3014b9a5064a6b8fd4a9a2f304b27fb9385c
How we checked: Read as rendered text in headless Chrome on 2026-10-01 and saved to the evidence archive, so the read can be repeated against the same file. Comparison ignores case, punctuation and hyphenation, which is why "open-source" on the record matches "open source" on the page.
Each claim is quoted from the vendor's own pages. This section describes what we have and have not checked — it is not a judgement about anyone.
Sponsorship is distribution, not an endorsement or a promise of search rankings, AI citations, traffic, or sales. This listing is a free entry, compiled from published sources.
Related reading
- Which PDF tools keep your file on your machine — what we count as processing on your own device.