which html tags does html to pdf support

Direct Download works off a real HTML parser, not a full renderer. It walks the parsed document and recognizes: headings h1, h2, h3; paragraphs (p); bulleted and numbered lists (ul, ol, li — including lists nested inside list items); blockquote; and pre (treated as a code block, with its whitespace and line breaks preserved). Each recognized element gets its own font and spacing in the output PDF — bold Helvetica for headings, regular Helvetica for paragraphs and list items, italic Times Roman for blockquotes, and monospace Courier for code blocks.

What Direct Download does not support: CSS of any kind (inline styles, a style tag, or the optional custom CSS field), images, tables, links (rendered as plain text, not clickable), inline formatting like bold or italic spans inside a paragraph, custom fonts, colors, or background styling. Any tag outside the recognized list — div, span, table, img, a, and similar — is not specially handled; text inside them is generally still walked and picked up as plain paragraph text, but their own layout or styling is not.

Print Exact Layout has no such tag list because it isn't a parser at all — it loads your HTML plus the optional CSS field into a real page and calls the browser's native print-to-PDF. Anything the browser itself can render (CSS Grid or Flexbox layouts, background images, web fonts, tables, colored text, embedded images) prints accordingly. Its ceiling is whatever your own browser supports, not a fixed tag list.

The practical rule: if your HTML is simple, semantic content (a note, an article body, a list-based document), Direct Download's structured output is faster and gives a clean, consistent PDF. If your HTML depends on CSS, images, tables, or specific visual layout, Print Exact Layout is the only method that will actually reflect that.