Seamlessly embedding pdfmake document previews into web applications
Fast preview generation and incremental updates, e.g. for editor scenarios or frequent changes
Lightweight alternative to the full pdfmake when rendering document previews on the client (50-110KB minified compared to 2MB)

Limitations

Paging is not implemented: The document is rendered as a single page
- Header and footer are rendered at the very top and the very bottom (for sections only if they specify their own)
- Watermark and background are rendered only once at the top (for sections only if they specify their own)
- Elements positioned through absolutePosition are positioned in reference to the top
- Page references are rendered as X
- linkToPage properties are ignored
- The table of contents does not render page numbers
- Manual page breaks specified through pageBreak are rendered as a horizontal line
- pageBreakBefore is not implemented
- For short content, we enforce the height of a single page (unless mode: 'fluid' is set)
Tiling patterns are not supported
Columns support is limited:
- Widths behave slightly differently, especially when combining * and auto widths
- Snaking columns do not support custom widths, and break at different places
Relative positioning ignores the alignment property
List markers in ordered lists are right-aligned, while pdfmake aligns them to the left
QR Codes look slightly different to the ones created by pdfmake, and may be larger for some values of fit
Attachments are not displayed
Sections support is limited:
- Sections do not support different page sizes
- Copying properties of the previous section via 'inherit' is not supported

Supported browsers

Currently, only evergreen browsers are supported explicitly (see .browserslistrc).

If you need to support older browsers with your application, you should be able to run this library through Babel as part of your build process and polyfill newer APIs through core-js.

On old browsers that do not support CSS variables, some styles may be broken.

Usage

Install this package:

npm install pdfmake-html-renderer

Add the CSS file:

import 'pdfmake-html-renderer/dist/index.css'

NOTE: For this to work, make sure your tooling/bundler supports importing CSS files. Otherwise, you can always use a <link rel="stylesheet"> in your HTML file.

(Optional) Import fonts:

Any fonts used in your PDF document definitions, including the default Roboto font, should be imported using CSS @font-face rules.

To use the version provided by Google Fonts, add the following HTML to your <head>:

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" />
<link
  href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Roboto:ital,wght@0,400;0,700;1,400;1,700&display=swap"
  rel="stylesheet"
/>

Otherwise, the renderer may use a fallback font depending on the fonts installed on the machine.

If you have a Content Security Policy, you might need to extend it:

style-src 'unsafe-inline' as computed styles are set inline
image-src data: for images passed as data URL

Integrate the component:

import PdfmakeHtmlRenderer from 'pdfmake-html-renderer'

This library was built using the Svelte framework, which should allow integrating it into pretty much any web application:

To consume it from a Svelte application, you may have to add build tooling to support TypeScript into your pipeline, as Svelte needs to compile the components from source
For a React or Vue.js application, you can use an adapter like svelte-adapter
For other frameworks or VanillaJS, have a look at the Svelte Component API

Check out the /examples folder for some example projects.

TIP: If you don't need QR Code support, you can try and ignore the qrcode package in your build process / bundler. This will roughly cut this package's bundle size in half.

TypeScript support

This package provides TypeScript typings. They depend on the typings for svelte and pdfmake, which are not included as dependencies and need to be added manually:

npm install -D svelte @types/pdfmake

Node.js server-side rendering [EXPERIMENTAL]

This library also provides an experimental server build that renders static HTML and CSS:

const { PdfmakeHtmlRenderer } = require('pdfmake-html-renderer/server')

const { html, css } = PdfmakeHtmlRenderer.render({
  document: { content: ['Hello, world!'] },
})

// html contains the HTML code
// css.code contains the CSS code

Check out /examples/nodejs for an exmaple.

Rendering on the server comes with some additional limitations:

QR codes are not supported
Zooming / shrinking the page does not work
Relative positioning may not always be placed correctly

Options / Props

`document: TDocumentDefinitions`

The pdfmake document definition

`pageShadow?: boolean`

Whether or not to display a shadow around the page.

Defaults to true

`mode?: 'shrinkToFit' | 'zoomToFit' | 'natural' | 'fluid'`

Rendering / sizing mode

shrinkToFit (default): Shrinks the document to fit in its container, but does not grow beyond the document's natural size
zoomToFit: Shrinks or grows the document to fit in its container
natural: Renders the document in its exact natural size
fluid: Ignores the document's pageSize and uses the space available in the container

When the document definition does not specify a pageSize property, the standard size 'A4' is assumed.

Keywords

pdfmake

pdf

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Package last updated on 17 Mar 2026

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pdfmake-html-renderer