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  • License MIT

Library for creating and modifying PDF files in JavaScript

Package Exports

  • pdf-lib
  • pdf-lib/lib/core/pdf-structures/factories/PDFXRefTableFactory

This package does not declare an exports field, so the exports above have been automatically detected and optimized by JSPM instead. If any package subpath is missing, it is recommended to post an issue to the original package (pdf-lib) to support the "exports" field. If that is not possible, create a JSPM override to customize the exports field for this package.

Readme

pdf-lib

Create and modify PDF documents in any JavaScript environment.
Designed to work in any modern JavaScript runtime. Tested in Node, Browser, and React Native environments.

Table of Contents

Motivation

pdf-lib was created to address the JavaScript ecosystem's lack of robust support for PDF manipulation (especially for PDF modification).

Two of pdf-lib's design requirements since its inception are to:

  1. Support modification (editing) of existing documents.
  2. Work in all JavaScript environments - not just in Node or the browser.

There are other good open source JavaScript PDF libraries available. However, most of them can only create documents, they cannot modify existing ones (e.g. pdfkit, jspdf, pdfmake). hummus is a NodeJS library capable of both creating and modifying PDF documents. However, hummus is a Node wrapper around a C++ library. This means that it cannot run in all JavaScript environments. For example, you cannot use hummus in the Browser or in React Native.

Features

  • Create new PDFs
  • Modify existing PDFs
  • Add Pages
  • Insert Pages
  • Remove Pages
  • Draw Text
  • Draw Images
  • Draw Vector Graphics
  • Embed Fonts
  • Embed Images

Usage Examples

More detailed examples are available here.

Document Creation

import { PDFDocumentFactory, PDFDocumentWriter } from 'pdf-lib/core/pdf-document';
import { drawText } from 'pdf-lib/helpers/pdf-operators/composite';

const pdfDoc = PDFDocumentFactory.create();
const [timesRomanFont] = pdfDoc.embedStandardFont('Times-Roman');

const page = pdfDoc
  .createPage([350, 500])
  .addFontDictionary('Times-Roman', timesRomanFont);

const contentStream = pdfDoc.createContentStream(
  drawText('Creating PDFs in JavaScript is awesome!', {
    x: 50,
    y: 450,
    size: 15,
    font: 'Times-Roman',
    colorRgb: [0, 0.53, 0.71],
  }),
);

page.addContentStreams(pdfDoc.register(contentStream));

pdfDoc.addPage(page);

const pdfBytes = PDFDocumentWriter.saveToBytes(pdfDoc);

Document Modification

import { PDFDocumentFactory, PDFDocumentWriter } from 'pdf-lib/core/pdf-document';
import { drawText } from 'pdf-lib/helpers/pdf-operators/composite';

// This should be a Uint8Array.
// This data can be obtained in a number of different ways.
// If your running in a Node environment, you could use fs.readFile().
// In the browser, you could make a fetch() call and use res.arrayBuffer().
const existingPdfDocBytes = ...

const pdfDoc = PDFDocumentFactory.load(existingPdfDocBytes);
const [helveticaFont] = pdfDoc.embedStandardFont('Helvetica');

const pages = pdfDoc.getPages();
const page  = pages[0];

page.addFontDictionary('Helvetica', helveticaFont);

const contentStream = pdfDoc.createContentStream(
  drawText('This text was added to the PDF with JavaScript!', {
    x: 25,
    y: 25,
    size: 24,
    font: 'Helvetica',
    colorRgb: [0.95, 0.26, 0.21],
  }),
);

page.addContentStreams(pdfDoc.register(contentStream));

const pdfBytes = PDFDocumentWriter.saveToBytes(pdfDoc);

Installation

npm install --save pdf-lib

or

yarn add pdf-lib

API Documentation

API documentation is available here.

Prior Art

  • pdfkit is a PDF generation library for Node and the Browser. This library was immensely helpful as a reference and existence proof when creating pdf-lib. pdfkit's code for font embedding, PNG embedding, and JPG embedding was especially useful.
  • jspdf is a PDF generation library for the browser.
  • pdfmake is a PDF generation library for the browser.
  • hummus is a PDF generation and modification library for Node environments. hummus is a Node wrapper around a C++ library.
  • react-native-pdf-lib is a PDF generation and modification library for React Native environments. react-native-pdf-lib is a wrapper around C++ and Java libraries.

License

MIT