pdfkit-next
A customized pdfkit build that uses not yet released fixes / features
- Fix Noto font rendering fontkit#230
- Fix for deprecated usage new Buffer fontkit#227
- Fix compatibility with CSF restructure#34 restructure#37
- Use browser friendly code fontkit#208 fontkit#209 linebreak#18
PDFKit
A JavaScript PDF generation library for Node and the browser.
Description
PDFKit is a PDF document generation library for Node and the browser that makes creating complex, multi-page, printable documents easy. The API embraces chainability, and includes both low level functions as well as abstractions for higher level functionality. The PDFKit API is designed to be simple, so generating complex documents is often as simple as a few function calls.
Check out some of the documentation and examples to see for yourself! You can also read the guide as a self-generated PDF with example output displayed inline. If you'd like to see how it was generated, check out the README in the docs folder.
You can also try out an interactive in-browser demo of PDFKit here.
Installation
Installation uses the npm package manager. Just type the following command after installing npm.
npm install pdfkit
Features
- Vector graphics
- HTML5 canvas-like API
- Path operations
- SVG path parser for easy path creation
- Transformations
- Linear and radial gradients
- Text
- Line wrapping
- Text alignments
- Bulleted lists
- Font embedding
- Supports TrueType (.ttf), OpenType (.otf), WOFF, WOFF2, TrueType Collections (.ttc), and Datafork TrueType (.dfont) fonts
- Font subsetting
- See fontkit for more details on advanced glyph layout support.
- Image embedding
- Supports JPEG and PNG files (including indexed PNGs, and PNGs with transparency)
- Annotations
- Links
- Notes
- Highlights
- Underlines
- etc.
- AcroForms
- Outlines
- PDF security
- Encryption
- Access privileges (printing, copying, modifying, annotating, form filling, content accessibility, document assembly)
Coming soon!
- Patterns fills
- Higher level APIs for creating tables and laying out content
- More performance optimizations
- Even more awesomeness, perhaps written by you! Please fork this repository and send me pull requests.
Example
const PDFDocument = ;const fs = ; // Create a documentconst doc = ; // Pipe its output somewhere, like to a file or HTTP response// See below for browser usagedoc; // Embed a font, set the font size, and render some textdoc fontSize25 text'Some text with an embedded font!' 100 100; // Add an image, constrain it to a given size, and center it vertically and horizontallydoc; // Add another pagedoc fontSize25 text'Here is some vector graphics...' 100 100; // Draw a triangledoc ; // Apply some transforms and render an SVG path with the 'even-odd' fill ruledoc ; // Add some text with annotationsdoc text'Here is a link!' 100 100 link100 100 160 27 'http://google.com/'; // Finalize PDF filedoc;
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 packagejs
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.
// require dependenciesconst PDFDocument = ;const blobStream = ; // create a document the same way as aboveconst doc = ; // pipe the document to a blobconst stream = doc; // add your content to the document here, as usual // get a blob when you're donedoc;stream;
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.
If you forget to install it, Browserify will print an error message.
Documentation
For complete API documentation and more examples, see the PDFKit website.
License
PDFKit is available under the MIT license.