Use Playwright for our HTML to PDF generation

[choldgraf]

Context

Currently, we make it possible to generate PDFs via the HTML using the pyppetteer package. We do that in this module:

https://github.com/executablebooks/jupyter-book/blob/91b52c4e872956cba774088bbb2d29451c000b89/jupyter_book/pdf.py#L34-L71

However, pyppetteer is a little bit difficult to work with, and is not super well-maintained (repo ref). For example, see the collection of caveats we need to include in our docs for this.

In the last few years, playwright has emerged as a very well-maintained and modern framework for web UI testing (and PDF generation). It has implementations and usage across several languages, and great documentation:

• https://playwright.dev/docs/intro

Proposal

We should explore replacing our pyppetteer implementation for PDF generation, and instead use playwright. Ideally the end-result should be cleaner and the performance more reliable / better.

We have a closed PR that implemented parts of this below, linking here in case somebody wishes to use that for inspiration or to pick it back up:

• https://github.com/executablebooks/jupyter-book/pull/1664

Tasks and updates

No response