A PDF generation library for Node.js
npm install pdfkitjavascript
const PDFDocument = require('pdfkit');
const fs = require('fs');
// Create a document
const doc = new PDFDocument();
// Pipe its output somewhere, like to a file or HTTP response
// See below for browser usage
doc.pipe(fs.createWriteStream('output.pdf'));
// Embed a font, set the font size, and render some text
doc
.font('fonts/PalatinoBold.ttf')
.fontSize(25)
.text('Some text with an embedded font!', 100, 100);
// Add an image, constrain it to a given size, and center it vertically and horizontally
doc.image('path/to/image.png', {
fit: [250, 300],
align: 'center',
valign: 'center'
});
// Add another page
doc
.addPage()
.fontSize(25)
.text('Here is some vector graphics...', 100, 100);
// Draw a triangle
doc
.save()
.moveTo(100, 150)
.lineTo(100, 250)
.lineTo(200, 250)
.fill('#FF3300');
// Apply some transforms and render an SVG path with the 'even-odd' fill rule
doc
.scale(0.6)
.translate(470, -380)
.path('M 250,75 L 323,301 131,161 369,161 177,301 z')
.fill('red', 'even-odd')
.restore();
// Add some text with annotations
doc
.addPage()
.fillColor('blue')
.text('Here is a link!', 100, 100)
.underline(100, 100, 160, 27, { color: '#0000FF' })
.link(100, 100, 160, 27, 'http://google.com/');
// Finalize PDF file
doc.end();
`
The PDF output from this example (with a few additions) shows the power of PDFKit — producing
complex documents with a very small amount of code. For more, see the demo folder and the
PDFKit programming guide.
Browser Usage
There are three ways to use PDFKit in the browser:
- Use Browserify. See demo source code and build script
- Use webpack. See complete example.
- Use prebuilt version. Distributed as pdfkit.standalone.js file in the releases or in the package js folder.
In addition to PDFKit, you'll need somewhere to stream the output to. HTML5 has a
Blob object which can be used to store binary data, and
get URLs to this data in order to display PDF output inside an iframe, or upload to a server, etc. In order to
get a Blob from the output of PDFKit, you can use the blob-stream
module.
The following example uses Browserify or webpack to load PDFKit and blob-stream. See here and here for examples
of prebuilt version usage.
`javascript
// require dependencies
const PDFDocument = require('pdfkit');
const blobStream = require('blob-stream');
// create a document the same way as above
const doc = new PDFDocument();
// pipe the document to a blob
const stream = doc.pipe(blobStream());
// add your content to the document here, as usual
// get a blob when you are done
doc.end();
stream.on('finish', function() {
// get a blob you can do whatever you like with
const blob = stream.toBlob('application/pdf');
// or get a blob URL for display in the browser
const url = stream.toBlobURL('application/pdf');
iframe.src = url;
});
`
You can see an interactive in-browser demo of PDFKit here.
Note that in order to Browserify a project using PDFKit, you need to install the brfs module with npm,
which is used to load built-in font data into the package. It is listed as a devDependency in
PDFKit's package.json`, so it isn't installed by default for Node users.