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A JavaScript PDF generation library for Node and the browser.

PDFKit is a PDF document generation library for Node and the browser that makes creating complex, multi-page, printabledocuments easy. The API embraces chainability, and includes both low level functions as well as abstractions for higherlevel functionality. The PDFKit API is designed to be simple, so generating complex documents is often as simple asa few function calls.

Check out some of thedocumentation and examples to see for yourself!You can also read the guide as aself-generated PDF with example output displayed inline.If you'd like to see how it was generated, check out the README in thedocsfolder.

You can also try out an interactive in-browser demo of PDFKithere.

Usenpm oryarn package manager. Just type the following command:

# with npmnpm install pdfkit# with yarnyarn add pdfkit

• 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
  • Seefontkit for more details on advanced glyph layout support.
• Image embedding
  • Supports JPEG and PNG files (including indexed PNGs, and PNGs with transparency)
• Tables
• 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)

• Patterns fills
• Higher level APIs for laying out content
• More performance optimizations
• Even more awesomeness, perhaps written by you! Please fork this repository and send me pull requests.

constPDFDocument=require('pdfkit');constfs=require('fs');// Create a documentconstdoc=newPDFDocument();// Pipe its output somewhere, like to a file or HTTP response// See below for browser usagedoc.pipe(fs.createWriteStream('output.pdf'));// Embed a font, set the font size, and render some textdoc.font('fonts/PalatinoBold.ttf').fontSize(25).text('Some text with an embedded font!',100,100);// Add an image, constrain it to a given size, and center it vertically and horizontallydoc.image('path/to/image.png',{fit:[250,300],align:'center',valign:'center'});// Add another pagedoc.addPage().fontSize(25).text('Here is some vector graphics...',100,100);// Draw a triangledoc.save().moveTo(100,150).lineTo(100,250).lineTo(200,250).fill('#FF3300');// Apply some transforms and render an SVG path with the 'even-odd' fill ruledoc.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();// Add some text with annotationsdoc.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/');// Finalize PDF filedoc.end();

The PDF output from this example (with a few additions) shows the power of PDFKit — producingcomplex documents with a very small amount of code. For more, see thedemo folder and thePDFKit programming guide.

There are three ways to use PDFKit in the browser:

• UseBrowserify. See demosource code andbuild script
• Usewebpack. Seecomplete example.
• Use prebuilt version. Distributed aspdfkit.standalone.js file in thereleases or in the packagejs folder.

In addition to PDFKit, you'll need somewhere to stream the output to. HTML5 has aBlob object which can be used to store binary data, andget URLs to this data in order to display PDF output inside an iframe, or upload to a server, etc. In order toget a Blob from the output of PDFKit, you can use theblob-streammodule.

The following example uses Browserify or webpack to loadPDFKit andblob-stream. Seehere andhere for examplesof prebuilt version usage.

// require dependenciesconstPDFDocument=require('pdfkit');constblobStream=require('blob-stream');// create a document the same way as aboveconstdoc=newPDFDocument();// pipe the document to a blobconststream=doc.pipe(blobStream());// add your content to the document here, as usual// get a blob when you are donedoc.end();stream.on('finish',function(){// get a blob you can do whatever you like withconstblob=stream.toBlob('application/pdf');// or get a blob URL for display in the browserconsturl=stream.toBlobURL('application/pdf');iframe.src=url;});

You can see an interactive in-browser demo of PDFKithere.

Note that in order to Browserify a project using PDFKit, you need to install thebrfs module,which is used to load built-in font data into the package. It is listed as adevDependency inPDFKit'spackage.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 thePDFKit website.

PDFKit is available under the MIT license.