pdf-img-convert-web.js

A pure javascript package to convert a PDF into images

This package is powered mainly by Mozilla's PDF.js

Motivation

This is a fork of pdf-img-convert with minor changes to offer browser support and not require a NodeJS runtime.

There are a lot of solutions for converting PDFs with javascript already but they all make excessive use of the filesystem in the form of temporary files and use non-native binaries like ghostscript.

This solution solely uses javascript arrays, cleaning up the pipeline significantly and (hopefully) making it faster.

Installation

npm install pdf-img-convert-web

Usage

The package returns an Array of Uint8Array objects, each of which represents an image encoded in png format.

Here are some examples of its usage - obviously import the module first:

var pdf2img = require('pdf-img-convert-web');

The package has 1 function - convert. It accepts the following pdf formats as input:

URL of a PDF (e.g. www.example.com/a.pdf)
Path to a local pdf file (e.g. ../example.pdf)
A Buffer object containing PDF data
A Uint8Array object containing PDF data
Base64-encoded PDF data

NB: it is an asynchronous function so returns a promise object.

The output can be manipulated using the conversion_config argument mentioned below.

Here's an example of how to use it in synchronous code:

// Both HTTP and local paths are supported
var outputImages1 = pdf2img.convert('http://www.example.com/pdf_online.pdf');
var outputImages2 = pdf2img.convert('../pdf_in_local_filesystem.pdf');


There is also an optional second `conversion_config` argument which accepts an object like this:

```javascript
{
  width: 100 //Number in px
  height: 100 // Number in px
  page_numbers: [1, 2, 3] // A list of pages to render instead of all of them
  base64: true,
  scale: 2.0
}

(Any of these attributes can be omitted from the object - they're all optional)

width or height control the scale of the output images - One or the other, it ignores height if width is supplied too.
page_numbers controls which pages are rendered - pages are 1-indexed.
base64 should be set to true if a base64-encoded image output is required. Otherwise it'll just output an array of Uint8Arrays.
scale is the viewport scale ratio, which defaults to 1 (original width and height).

Contributing

If you'd like to contribute, please do submit a pull request!

Once you've finalised your changes, please include a summary of these changes under the [Unreleased] section of CHANGELOG.md in this format.