When we evaluated the Rust PDF landscape, printpdf was actually one of the first crates we looked at for PDF generation. The reason we opted for a stack centered around lopdf and pdf-writer was architectural: PaperPilot's primary focus is heavy manipulation and non-destructive AST transformation of existing, arbitrary, often malformed real-world PDFs (re-ordering cross-reference tables, granular /P permission bitmask hashing, raw object streams, page imposition, booklet folding, and outline splitting).
For document synthesis (HTML/Markdown to PDF), typography and edge-cases (like the RTL/footnote issues you mentioned) are notoriously hard, and we'd love to learn from or collaborate with printpdf's battle-tested approaches there. Thank you for the feedback and all your contributions to Rust's PDF ecosystem!