A PDF generation library for Node.js
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 uses the npm package manager. Just type the following command after installing npm.
npm install pdfkit
PDFDocument = require 'pdfkit'# Create a documentdoc =# Pipe its output somewhere, like to a file or HTTP response# See below for browser usagedocpipe fscreateWriteStream'output.pdf'# Embed a font, set the font size, and render some textdocfont'fonts/PalatinoBold.ttf'fontSize25text'Some text with an embedded font!'100100# Add another pagedocaddPagefontSize25text'Here is some vector graphics...'100100# Draw a triangledocsavemoveTo100150lineTo100250lineTo200250fill"#FF3300"# Apply some transforms and render an SVG path with the 'even-odd' fill ruledocscale0.6translate470-380path'M 250,75 L 323,301 131,161 369,161 177,301 z'fill'red''even-odd'restore# Add some text with annotationsdocaddPagefillColor"blue"text'Here is a link!'100100underline10010016027color: "#0000FF"link10010016027''# Finalize PDF filedocend
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.
There are two ways to use PDFKit in the browser. The first is to use Browserify,
which is a Node module packager for the browser with the familiar
require syntax. The second is to use
a prebuilt version of PDFKit, which you can download from Github.
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 to load
blob-stream, but if you're not using Browserify,
you can load them in whatever way you'd like (e.g. script tags).
# require dependenciesPDFDocument = require 'pdfkit'blobStream = require 'blob-stream'# create a document the same way as abovedoc =# pipe the document to a blobstream = docpipeblobStream# add your content to the document here, as usual# get a blob when you're donedocendstreamon 'finish'-># get a blob you can do whatever you like withblob = streamtoBlob'application/pdf'# or get a blob URL for display in the browserurl = streamtoBlobURL'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
package.json, so it isn't installed by default for Node users.
If you forget to install it, Browserify will print an error message.
For complete API documentation and more examples, see the PDFKit website.
PDFKit is available under the MIT license.