What is pdfkit?
PDFKit is a JavaScript library for generating PDF documents, allowing you to create multi-page documents with text, images, vector graphics, and more. It is highly customizable and can be used both in Node.js and browser environments.
What are pdfkit's main functionalities?
Text
This feature allows you to add text to your PDF document. The code sample demonstrates how to create a PDF document and add a 'Hello, World!' text at coordinates (100, 100) with a font size of 25.
const PDFDocument = require('pdfkit');
const fs = require('fs');
const doc = new PDFDocument();
doc.pipe(fs.createWriteStream('output.pdf'));
doc.fontSize(25).text('Hello, World!', 100, 100);
doc.end();
Images
This feature allows you to add images to your PDF document. The code sample demonstrates how to add an image to the PDF at coordinates (100, 150) with a width of 300 units.
const PDFDocument = require('pdfkit');
const fs = require('fs');
const doc = new PDFDocument();
doc.pipe(fs.createWriteStream('output.pdf'));
doc.image('path/to/image.png', 100, 150, {width: 300});
doc.end();
Vector Graphics
This feature allows you to draw vector graphics such as rectangles, circles, and lines. The code sample demonstrates how to draw a red rectangle at coordinates (100, 100) with a width and height of 200 units.
const PDFDocument = require('pdfkit');
const fs = require('fs');
const doc = new PDFDocument();
doc.pipe(fs.createWriteStream('output.pdf'));
doc.rect(100, 100, 200, 200).fill('#FF0000');
doc.end();
Tables
This feature allows you to create tables within your PDF document. The code sample demonstrates how to create a simple table with headers and rows.
const PDFDocument = require('pdfkit');
const fs = require('fs');
const doc = new PDFDocument();
doc.pipe(fs.createWriteStream('output.pdf'));
doc.text('Table Example', 100, 50);
doc.moveDown();
const table = {
headers: ['Header 1', 'Header 2', 'Header 3'],
rows: [
['Row 1 Col 1', 'Row 1 Col 2', 'Row 1 Col 3'],
['Row 2 Col 1', 'Row 2 Col 2', 'Row 2 Col 3'],
]
};
doc.table(table, {width: 500});
doc.end();
Links
This feature allows you to add hyperlinks to your PDF document. The code sample demonstrates how to add a clickable link that directs to Google's website.
const PDFDocument = require('pdfkit');
const fs = require('fs');
const doc = new PDFDocument();
doc.pipe(fs.createWriteStream('output.pdf'));
doc.text('Click here to visit Google', 100, 100).link(100, 100, 160, 27, 'http://www.google.com');
doc.end();
Other packages similar to pdfkit
pdf-lib
pdf-lib is a library for creating and modifying PDF documents in JavaScript. It is similar to PDFKit but offers a more modern API and additional features like form filling and annotation. It is also designed to work in both Node.js and browser environments.
jspdf
jsPDF is a popular library for generating PDF documents in JavaScript. It is often used for client-side PDF generation in web applications. Compared to PDFKit, jsPDF is more focused on simplicity and ease of use, making it a good choice for basic PDF generation tasks.
pdfmake
pdfmake is a library for generating PDF documents in JavaScript. It uses a declarative approach to document creation, making it easy to define complex layouts. Compared to PDFKit, pdfmake is more focused on layout and styling, making it a good choice for creating well-formatted documents.
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 (with soft hyphen recognition)
- 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)
- 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
const PDFDocument = require('pdfkit');
const fs = require('fs');
const doc = new PDFDocument();
doc.pipe(fs.createWriteStream('output.pdf'));
doc
.font('fonts/PalatinoBold.ttf')
.fontSize(25)
.text('Some text with an embedded font!', 100, 100);
doc.image('path/to/image.png', {
fit: [250, 300],
align: 'center',
valign: 'center'
});
doc
.addPage()
.fontSize(25)
.text('Here is some vector graphics...', 100, 100);
doc
.save()
.moveTo(100, 150)
.lineTo(100, 250)
.lineTo(200, 250)
.fill('#FF3300');
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();
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/');
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 the demo
folder and the
PDFKit programming guide.
Browser Usage
There are three ways to use PDFKit in the browser:
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.
const PDFDocument = require('pdfkit');
const blobStream = require('blob-stream');
const doc = new PDFDocument();
const stream = doc.pipe(blobStream());
doc.end();
stream.on('finish', function() {
const blob = stream.toBlob('application/pdf');
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.
Documentation
For complete API documentation and more examples, see the PDFKit website.
License
PDFKit is available under the MIT license.