node-poppler

node-poppler

Asynchronous node.js wrapper for the Poppler PDF rendering library

Intro

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. It was created out of a need for a PDF-to-HTML conversion module at Yeovil District Hospital NHS Foundation Trust to convert clinical documents in PDF format to HTML.

Installation

Install using npm:

npm install node-poppler

Or yarn:

yarn add node-poppler

node-poppler's test scripts use npm commands.

Linux and macOS/Darwin Support

Windows and macOS/Darwin binaries are provided with this repository. For Linux users, you will need to download the poppler-data and poppler-utils binaries separately.

An example of downloading the binaries on a Debian system:

sudo apt-get install poppler-data
sudo apt-get install poppler-utils

If you do not wish to use the included macOS binaries, you can download the latest versions with Homebrew:

brew install poppler

Once they have been installed, you will need to pass the poppler-utils installation directory in as parameters to an instance of the Poppler class:

const { Poppler } = require("node-poppler");
const poppler = new Poppler("./usr/bin");

API

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

API Documentation can be found here

Examples

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);

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, options).then((res) => {
	console.log(res);
});

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

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

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

poppler.pdfToHtml(file, options).then((res) => {
	console.log(res);
});

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,
};

poppler.pdfToText(file, options).then((res) => {
	console.log(res);
});

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for more details regarding contributing to this project.

Acknowledgements

• Albert Astals Cid - Poppler developer
• Filipe Fernandes - poppler-feedstock maintainer
• Peter Williams - poppler-feedstock maintainer
• Owen Schwartz - poppler-windows developer

License

node-poppler is licensed under the MIT license.

Changelog

3.0.0 (2021-04-29)

⚠ BREAKING CHANGES

• remove support for nodejs v10, as it is EOL as of 2021-04-30

Miscellaneous

• remove support for node v10 (fa1a8c1)

Documentation

• grammar and readability fixes (4637e3e)

Continuous integration

• add nodejs v16 to unit test matrix (52ead20)
• link-check: ignore links to lib binaries (f71f67b)