Pdfgen NPM | npm.io

pdfgen

This tool is dedicated to the generation of a PDF file from a given URL in a highly customizable manner. It makes use of the Google Puppeteer API to utilize Chromium to fulfill the task. It also ships some website examples which provide tips on how to design the pages to be printable.

Why another PDF generation tool?
Requirements
Getting started
Example Website
Development
Contributing
License
Code of Conduct

Why another PDF generation tool?

If you are into typesetting/LaTeX or tools like wkhtmltopdf you know they can be hard to manage by web devs or are not intented to be simple at usage. This is especially worse when it comes to dynamic content like user customizable info papers. pdfgen allows you to easily make use of the latest web technologies which are supported by Chromium. (including CSS3 flexbox, custom webfonts, etc)

Requirements

Node.js (>=16)
GNU Make (development) (>=4.2.1)

Getting started

The first and only preparation step is the installation of the pdfgen utility. Open up your favorite terminal emulator and paste the following command:

# Install the pdfgen utility
$ npm install -g pdfgen

NPM will take care of the installation of the dependencies, including the Puppeteer API plus the Chromium build for your machine. All you need to do now is to use it like this:

# Generate a PDF from a URL
$ pdfgen 'http://google.com' google.pdf

Commandline options

As the getting started section demonstrated, the usage of the pdfgen utility is straightforward. It just requires two arguments, the URL and the destination of the resulting PDF file. But thats not all. You can customize the resulting PDF as well as the website which is visited. Here comes a complete list of supported commandline options:

Option	Description
-T, --timeout	The maximum time to wait for the page to be loaded in ms. 30000
-d, --delay	Wait for a given time after the page was opened in ms. 1000
-t, --network-timeout	Same as --delay, deprecated 1000
-m, --media	Changes the CSS media type of the page. (page, print)
-l, --landscape	Paper orientation. (false, true)
-h, --header-footer	Display header and footer. (false, true)
-b, --background	Print background graphics. (false, true)
-s, --scale	Scale of the webpage rendering. (1)
-r, --range	Paper ranges to print, e.g., "1-5, 8". (prints all pages)
-f, --format	Paper format. If set, takes priority over width or height options. (A4)
-w, --width	Paper width, accepts values labeled with units.
-H, --height	Paper height, accepts values labeled with units.
-M, --margin	All margins, accepts values labeled with units. (0)
-N, --margin-top	Top margin, accepts values labeled with units.
-W, --margin-right	Right margin, accepts values labeled with units.
-S, --margin-bottom	Bottom margin, accepts values labeled with units.
-E, --margin-left	Left margin, accepts values labeled with units.
-p, --header-template	HTML template for the print header.
-P, --footer-template	HTML template for the print footer.
-a, --header	Additional HTTP header (eg. `X-Custom: true`)

Units options

px - pixel
cm - centimeter
in - inch
mm - millimeter

Format options

Letter: 8.5in x 11in
Tabloid: 11in x 17in
A0: 33.1in x 46.8in
A2: 16.5in x 23.4in
A4: 8.27in x 11.7in
Legal: 8.5in x 14in
Ledger: 17in x 11in
A1: 23.4in x 33.1in
A3: 11.7in x 16.5in
A5: 5.83in x 8.27in

Template injection classes

date: formatted print date
title: document title
url: document location
pageNumber: current page number
totalPages: total pages in the document

Example Website

This repository contains a full test page project which demonstrate the simple usage of the pdfgen utility on a custom website. It makes use of the pug template engine, SASS, and vanilla JavaScript. Just have a look at the few simple lines of code and play around with it or just view the resulting PDF file if your are curious.

There are some caveats you should know about: The PDF generation (print media) does not work very well with the responsive approach. You can of course implement your custom website this way and provide a different stylesheet for the print media type, but this won't save you from the content-per-page issue in case you care about fixed headers/footers. The last page at the example website will demonstrate this issue.

The general advise here is to use a custom page class which works like a content container with a fixed height and width (make use of the 100vh/100vw values for height and width to be "responsive" on the resulting media). With this approach you just need to how much content will be on a single page. (If you are in LaTeX, you will know about this concept already)

So in the end you take care of long dynamic texts with some functions on your template engine and cut it into fitting pieces for each page. You could implement a function which cuts the text after n characters while respecting word boundaries. Then the resulting set of chunks represent a single page by each.

These are the worst things to know. But here comes the good news: you can make use of any modern web technology, including CSS3 (flexbox, counters etc) and custom web fonts just like that.

Development

After checking out the repo, run make install to install dependencies. Then, run make test to run the tests.

To release a new version, update the version number in package.json, commit this change, and finally create a git tag for the version. The release to npmjs.com must be done manually at the moment.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/hausgold/pdfgen. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.