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
- Text
- Font embedding
- Image embedding
- Annotations
- AcroForms
- Outlines
- PDF security
- Accessibility support (marked content, logical structure, Tagged PDF, PDF/UA)
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
```javascript 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 thedemo
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.
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.
If you forget to install it, Browserify will print an error message.