node-poppler

node-poppler

Asynchronous Node.js wrapper for the Poppler PDF rendering library

Overview

Poppler is a PDF rendering library that also includes a collection of utility binaries, which allows for the manipulation and extraction of data from PDF documents such as converting PDF files to HTML, TXT, or PostScript.

The node-poppler module provides an asynchronous Node.js wrapper around said utility binaries for easier use.

Installation

Install using npm:

npm i node-poppler

Linux and macOS/Darwin support

Windows binaries are provided with this repository. For Linux and Mac users, the poppler-data and poppler-utils binaries binary will need to be installed separately.

An example of downloading the binaries on a Debian system:

sudo apt-get install poppler-data poppler-utils

For macOS users, the binaries can be installed with Homebrew:

brew install poppler

API

API documentation can be found here.

Example usage

poppler.pdfToCairo

Example of an async await call to poppler.pdfToCairo(), to convert only the first and second page of a PDF file to PNG:

const { Poppler } = require("node-poppler");

const file = "test_document.pdf";
const poppler = new Poppler();
const options = {
	firstPageToConvert: 1,
	lastPageToConvert: 2,
	pngFile: true,
};
const outputFile = `test_document.png`;

const res = await poppler.pdfToCairo(file, outputFile, options);
console.log(res);

Example of an async await call to poppler.pdfToCairo(), to convert only the first page of a PDF file to a new PDF file using stdout:

const { writeFile } = require("node:fs/promises");
const { Poppler } = require("node-poppler");

const file = "test_document.pdf";
const poppler = new Poppler();
const options = {
	lastPageToConvert: 1,
	pdfFile: true,
};

const res = await poppler.pdfToCairo(file, undefined, options);
// pdfToCairo writes to stdout using binary encoding if pdfFile or singleFile options are used
await writeFile("new_file.pdf", res, { encoding: "binary", flush: true });

poppler.pdfToHtml

Example of calling poppler.pdfToHtml() with a promise chain:

const { Poppler } = require("node-poppler");

const file = "test_document.pdf";
const poppler = new Poppler();
const options = {
	firstPageToConvert: 1,
	lastPageToConvert: 2,
};

poppler
	.pdfToHtml(file, undefined, options)
	.then((res) => {
		console.log(res);
	})
	.catch((err) => {
		console.error(err);
		throw err;
	});

Example of calling poppler.pdfToHtml() with a promise chain, providing a Buffer as an input:

const { readFileSync } = require("node:fs");
const { Poppler } = require("node-poppler");

const file = readFileSync("test_document.pdf");
const poppler = new Poppler();
const options = {
	firstPageToConvert: 1,
	lastPageToConvert: 2,
};

poppler
	.pdfToHtml(file, "tester.html", options)
	.then((res) => {
		console.log(res);
	})
	.catch((err) => {
		console.error(err);
		throw err;
	});

poppler.pdfToText

Example of calling poppler.pdfToText() with a promise chain:

const { Poppler } = require("node-poppler");

const file = "test_document.pdf";
const poppler = new Poppler();
const options = {
	firstPageToConvert: 1,
	lastPageToConvert: 2,
};
const outputFile = "test_document.txt";

poppler
	.pdfToText(file, outputFile, options)
	.then((res) => {
		console.log(res);
	})
	.catch((err) => {
		console.error(err);
		throw err;
	});

Contributing

Contributions are welcome, and any help is greatly appreciated!

See the contributing guide for details on how to get started. Please adhere to this project's Code of Conduct when contributing.

Acknowledgements

• Albert Astals Cid - Poppler developer
• Filipe Fernandes - poppler-feedstock maintainer
• Peter Williams - poppler-feedstock maintainer
• Owen Schwartz - poppler-windows developer
• Uwe Korn - poppler-feedstock maintainer
• Xylar Asay-Davis - poppler-feedstock maintainer

License

node-poppler is licensed under the MIT license.

Changelog

8.0.3 (2025-07-08)

Improvements

• index: cache pdfinfo path regex (#660) (0c81b11)
• index: import node:process explicitly (#662) (ebd0b72)

Miscellaneous

• index: use upper snakecase for cached values (#658) (55613b3)