PDFKit

    PDFKit is a PDF document generation library for Node and the browser that makes creating complex, multi-page, printable documents easy. It's written in CoffeeScript, but you can choose to use the API in plain 'ol JavaScript if you like. 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 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 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.

    • Vector graphics
      • HTML5 canvas-like API
      • Path operations
      • Transformations
      • Linear and radial gradients
    • Text
      • Line wrapping
      • Text alignments
      • Bulleted lists
    • Font embedding
      • Supports TrueType (.ttf), TrueType Collections (.ttc), and Datafork TrueType (.dfont) fonts
      • Font subsetting
    • Image embedding
      • Supports JPEG and PNG files (including indexed PNGs, and PNGs with transparency)

    • Patterns fills

    • Outlines
    • PDF Security
    • 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

    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 folder and the .

    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 usea prebuilt version of PDFKit, which you can .

    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, andget 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 module.

    The following example uses Browserify to load and blob-stream, but if you're not using Browserify, you can load them in whatever way you'd like (e.g. script tags).

    Note that in order to Browserify a project using PDFKit, you need to install the module with npm, which is used to load built-in font data into the package. It is listed as a devDependency in PDFKit's , 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 is available under the MIT license.

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