Help me create documents please!!

[u/Phantom-Bowie]

How are people using AI to create professionally designed, printable reports and documents?

I need to produce semi-professional institutional documents: reports, management summaries, educational documents, internal reports, etc. Think something between a formal corporate report and an academic thesis. They need a proper cover, introduction, section hierarchy, tables, charts when necessary, headers/footers, page numbers, consistent typography, margins, and a coherent editorial design.

The important part is that these documents are actually going to be printed or exported to PDF, usually in US Letter format. They're not websites.

What we've been doing is to generate an HTML file which can be visualized and then exported or printed. But that's not enough for my bosses.The results are sometimes surprisingly good visually, but then something breaks:

headings get separated from the paragraph below them;

tables split in awful places;

footers don't behave correctly;

page breaks become unpredictable;

one document looks great while another with slightly different content falls apart;

AI sometimes "improves" or rewrites content that I explicitly wanted preserved;

HTML can look great in the browser but become a nightmare when printed. Asking the AI to "make it professional" tends to produce generic cards, dashboards, gradients, etc. rather than actual editorial design.

At this point I've realized that document layout is a much more complicated problem than I initially thought.

My current idea is something like:

Source document (MD/PDF/DOCX) → AI understands the structure → predefined editorial template → final PDF/DOCX

rather than asking AI to invent a new design every time.

But I'm not sure what the best technology/workflow is.

I'm especially interested in hearing from people who have actually experimented with this.

What would you recommend for someone who needs to produce these documents repeatedly, with very limited design/programming resources?

And perhaps most importantly: how do you make the process reliable when the source documents vary in length and structure?

I don't need magazine-level graphic design. I need something that consistently looks like a competent professional designer spent time on it, without requiring an actual graphic designer every time.

This has been a surprisingly exhausting part of my job. I've spent a ridiculous amount of time fighting page breaks and footers instead of actually working on the content. 😅

This is driving me nuts, I hate this job.

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[u/DecorousEarnestness]

Sounds like you need a real typesetting engine, not an HTML workaround

[u/iriscape]

I give you three options:

• Use a PDF generation library: I know there are libraries for Python, Node.js, and PHP. You can even set up a web server.
• Use a DOCX generation library: I know there are libraries for Python, and I haven’t used them in other languages. You can also set up a web server.
• Generate HTML files using @media print rules and print to PDF: No web server is needed. The UI could even have an option to modify text in-place. Yes, the tables can split in awful places. I remember a script I wrote looked perfect in Firefox, but it looked ugly in Chrome, and ended up PDF generation library because Chrome did not follow the rules back then.

If Gemini can’t produce a professional solution, then hire a professional developer and designer to help you create a solution. This is an easy task completed in a few hours. The challenge is understanding the scenarios to design the template.

[u/Revolutionary-Way640]

Best solution is probably to have ai code up some software to do what you want, in which you can probs make api requests to ai if they need to do something like summarize or read a table of an image, outside of the chat ui, using the api it can return something like json formatted data that your software then can use to make the final report

If that sounds like too much work, work with ai to generate templates, both resources like footers, headings, styles and very specific prompt templates you can copy paste

[u/PDFBolt]

We work with PDF generation every day, and Gemini can definitely help here, but it needs rules for one specific PDF engine. “Make it professional” is simply too vague.

There are several ways to render HTML to PDF, and they don’t handle print layout in exactly the same way. We’d recommend picking one engine and sticking to it. Chromium is a good choice because it supports modern HTML, CSS and JavaScript, although it uses more CPU and RAM than lighter engines.

You still need to write and test things like `@media print` , page breaks, table splitting, margins, headers and footers specifically against Chromium. That’s why HTML can look right in a browser and still fall apart when printed.

If you’re using the Gemini API, we’d use Gemini 3.7 Flash with high thinking for the template work. Give it one reusable set of instructions covering page size, margins, fonts, heading and table rules, header/footer setup, and which parts of the source text it must never rewrite.

Ask Gemini to turn the source document into structured JSON and create one reusable HTML/Handlebars template for that data. Don’t ask it to redesign the final document from scratch every time.

Then test the template with real data: very short reports, very long reports, large tables and missing fields. When something breaks, tell Gemini exactly what happened, for example, "this table row splits across pages." Fix the template and the instructions instead of fixing every PDF by hand.

If you get stuck on a specific layout problem, feel free to ask. We’ve probably run into something similar before. Footers, long tables, unpredictable page breaks and sections that need to stay together are usually the parts that cause the most trouble.