

PSPDFKit Processor combines PDF generation with powerful document operations that can streamline repetitive tasks such as merging and watermarking. For example, you can generate a document, prepend a predefined introduction page, and watermark all pages in a single API request. However, considering the increased file size and resulting image, I’d recommend you build a component on your server with Puppeteer so that you can serve nice PDFs.Īnd if you want to save time with an out-of-the-box solution, make sure to check out PDF Generation for PSPDFKit Processor, which offers support for:įorms - HTML forms and inputs will be converted to fillable PDF forms, which currently isn’t possible with Puppeteer.Īn HTTP API - Processor can be controlled via an HTTP API with a flexible authentication/authorization mechanism, making it suitable for both backend and frontend use.Įxtensible workflows - You can combine PDF generation with other operations. If you need something quickly and don’t want to build anything on your server to create PDF files, you’re good to go with html2pdf. The main disadvantage of using Puppeteer is that you’ll need to run a server instead of generating the PDF on the client. Additionally, the file size is significantly lower compared to the html2pdf example, Puppeteer’s resulting PDF is about four times smaller. You’ll be able to select and copy the text from the PDF, and you don’t need to worry about resolution since it’ll always be sharp. The biggest advantage of Puppeteer is that it creates an actual PDF file with text content instead of just using an image.
#Pdfkit buffer nodejs download#
Then we’ll call this function in a download button: There are a few options, but the one I found most common was PDFKit. To begin, we first define a generatePDF() function that will get the element we’ve rendered the invoice in and then call html2pdf with that element to download it directly on our users’ client. Generating PDFs in Node with PDFKit Next, we will look at generating a PDF in Node.
#Pdfkit buffer nodejs install#
You can download it from the GitHub repository, or if you already have a bundler in your site, you can install it via npm or yarn. I downloaded the bundled html2pdf JavaScript library directly and imported it to our site. However, you can easily generate the HTML for your own invoice in your backend if you prefer. For our example, I’m using the Simple HTML Invoice Template, and I statically typed in the invoice we’ll use. The html2pdf library allows you to embed it in your website and make parts of your site downloadable as PDFs, but today, we’ll focus on making a PDF in our application downloadable. Lastly, we’ll cover the advantages and disadvantages of both libraries. In this post, we’ll take a look at two popular JavaScript libraries for converting HTML pages to PDFs. For example, invoices, concert tickets, and flight tickets tend to be available as PDF downloads. A common use case in JavaScript for HTML-to-PDF conversion is giving your website visitors the ability to download HTML content as a PDF file.
