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.

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, undefined, 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, "tester.html", 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

Contributions are welcome, and any help is greatly appreciated!

See CONTRIBUTING.md 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

License

node-poppler is licensed under the MIT license.

Changelog

4.1.0 (2021-06-02)

Features

• index: add printAsJson arg to pdfInfo() options (56a2ffb), thanks to @sainf

Bug fixes

• index: normalize binary paths (15cb1a1)

Miscellaneous

• workflows: remove stale.yml (167484a)

Continuous integration

• cd: move perf optimizations and refactoring into same section (842d3f5)

Dependencies

• deps-dev: bump eslint-plugin-jsdoc from 34.8.2 to 35.1.2 (277f31f)
• deps-dev: bump jest from 26.6.3 to 27.0.3 (e28c345)

Documentation

• readme: grammar and wordiness fixes (4a02092)
• readme: update pdfToHtml() examples (e10a821)
• readme: update contributing section (99f4cd6)