pdfkit

A JavaScript PDF generation library for Node and the browser

PDF
foliojs/pdfkitpdfkit.org/pdfkit

README

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
  - 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


  1. ``` js
  2. const PDFDocument = require('pdfkit');
  3. const fs = require('fs');

  5. // Create a document
  6. const doc = new PDFDocument();

  8. // Pipe its output somewhere, like to a file or HTTP response
  9. // See below for browser usage
  10. doc.pipe(fs.createWriteStream('output.pdf'));

  12. // Embed a font, set the font size, and render some text
  13. doc
  14.   .font('fonts/PalatinoBold.ttf')
  15.   .fontSize(25)
  16.   .text('Some text with an embedded font!', 100, 100);

  18. // Add an image, constrain it to a given size, and center it vertically and horizontally
  19. doc.image('path/to/image.png', {
  20.   fit: [250, 300],
  21.   align: 'center',
  22.   valign: 'center'
  23. });

  25. // Add another page
  26. doc
  27.   .addPage()
  28.   .fontSize(25)
  29.   .text('Here is some vector graphics...', 100, 100);

  31. // Draw a triangle
  32. doc
  33.   .save()
  34.   .moveTo(100, 150)
  35.   .lineTo(100, 250)
  36.   .lineTo(200, 250)
  37.   .fill('#FF3300');

  39. // Apply some transforms and render an SVG path with the 'even-odd' fill rule
  40. doc
  41.   .scale(0.6)
  42.   .translate(470, -380)
  43.   .path('M 250,75 L 323,301 131,161 369,161 177,301 z')
  44.   .fill('red', 'even-odd')
  45.   .restore();

  47. // Add some text with annotations
  48. doc
  49.   .addPage()
  50.   .fillColor('blue')
  51.   .text('Here is a link!', 100, 100)
  52.   .underline(100, 100, 160, 27, { color: '#0000FF' })
  53.   .link(100, 100, 160, 27, 'http://google.com/');

  55. // Finalize PDF file
  56. doc.end();
  57. ```

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:

- Use Browserify. See demo source code and build script
- Use webpack. See complete example.
- Use prebuilt version. Distributed as pdfkit.standalone.js file in the releases or in the packagejs folder.

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.

  1. ``` js
  2. // require dependencies
  3. const PDFDocument = require('pdfkit');
  4. const blobStream = require('blob-stream');

  6. // create a document the same way as above
  7. const doc = new PDFDocument();

  9. // pipe the document to a blob
  10. const stream = doc.pipe(blobStream());

  12. // add your content to the document here, as usual

  14. // get a blob when you are done
  15. doc.end();
  16. stream.on('finish', function() {
  17.   // get a blob you can do whatever you like with
  18.   const blob = stream.toBlob('application/pdf');

  20.   // or get a blob URL for display in the browser
  21.   const url = stream.toBlobURL('application/pdf');
  22.   iframe.src = url;
  23. });
  24. ```

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.