JsPDF - HTML5 PDF generator

by smanuel • 13 years ago

191 67 13 years ago

mikegioia2• 13 years ago

This is pretty awesome, but I think something that could PDF an html page would be much more valuable. Currently I have to use some wkhtmltopdf server-side trickery.

brianfryer• 13 years ago

Use PhantomJS to Create PDFs from HTML: https://coderwall.com/p/5vmo1g

nlh• 13 years ago

Thank you for the lead - looks good. I found this, which goes into a bit more details for the Rails folks (like me):

http://big-elephants.com/2012-12/pdf-rendering-with-phantomj...

Looks very promising. Open to suggestions if others have better PDF-generating solutions!

paulwithap• 13 years ago

What they don't tell you is that this method takes a long time and generates huge files unless you used a patched version of qt. I've been meaning to write a blog post on this.

_sh• 13 years ago

PhantomJS uses the same mechanism that wkhtmltopdf uses (headless webkit) and thus requires the 'server-side trickery' mentioned by the parent.

Also, the correct link is http://phantomjs.org/

goldins• 13 years ago

I've used PrinceXML in the past and it worked well: http://www.princexml.com/

mjn• 13 years ago

For use on the web you'll need a server license, though, which is $3800 for one machine. Fine if it's a business with revenue, but pretty steep for side projects or free services.

(There's also a free version for non-commercial users, but it's really only usable for evaluation, because it adds a PrinceXML logo to the generated PDFs.)

cju• 13 years ago

IIRC it's one of the few big applications written with Mercury functional logic language.

aeontech• 13 years ago

Last time I had to generate pdf's, I just generated latex markup and then rendered it to pdf.

You could look into something like http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com/ though.

DenisM2• 13 years ago

The nice thing about HTML is that it does layout for you. If you have to generate PDF yourself you have to do the layout, in particular sizing tables is a huge pain...

piggity• 13 years ago

I was using LaTeX => PDF generation, but because I don't do it all the time I found it cumbersome and confusing at times.

Prawn seems to have come a long way since I used it last - and has addressed all the limitations that pushed me towards LaTeX in the first place.

Definitely worth looking at Prawn again in my opinion.

HarrietJones3• 13 years ago

The version of this I used had basic HTML Rendering in it. I believe that the author (@mrRio) was going to do more on that. It looks, for the moment, that they've stopped mentioning the HTML rendering though, so maybe that was too tricky.

Maybe the prior HTML rendering functions are still in the source. I think it's worth downloading and checking.

gsnedders• 13 years ago

Another option is WeasyPrint — although it is rather slow.

thejosh• 13 years ago

wkhtmltopdf to me is very unstable and crashes quite often.

How have you found it?

mikegioia2• 13 years ago

It's been pretty flawless for me. I'm running the 64 bit 0.11.0 static RC1. Like another post said though, it's really a pain to handle page breaks, page numbers, headers/footers etc. But for straight HTML page -> PDF it's really good.

lutusp2• 13 years ago

Currently I have to use some wkhtmltopdf server-side trickery.

I've used wkhtmltopdf, but lately I've discovered that Chrome does a pretty good job if you print a page, then specify print-to-file to a PDF destination.

herge• 13 years ago

That's probably the same rendering engine as wkhtmltopdf; the wk stands for webkit.

kayoone• 13 years ago

HTMLtoPDF is so convenient until you need clean page breaks, page numbers, consistent header/footers etc..getting that right is extremely tedious with HTML so until now i always needed to revert back to a full blown (often expensive) PDF lib. Any1 has a better solution ?

ahmett• 13 years ago

Github link is missing on that page. https://github.com/MrRio/jsPDF

ncrit• 13 years ago

Small Typo: "A HTML5 client-side solution for generating PDFs". I think it should be "An HTML5 client-side solution for generating PDFs".

TAGrammarNazi• 13 years ago

Fiercely off topic, but it depends on your pronunciation of "H"

dsego• 13 years ago

Obligatory Mitchell & Webb http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3y0CD2CoCs

HarrietJones3• 13 years ago

Previously hosted at JsPDF.Com. I'm not sure why it's moved, but I've used this library and can attest to its awesomeness. It seems really stable to me. I use it to create and print off 4 page employment applications.

Gotchas : 1 - It can be hard to get downloading working using the Flash shim (For IE9 and below). It is possible though. 2 - Images have to be Base64 encoded, and that can be a royal pain.

I'm not the worlds best developer by a long chalk, but I had this library wrapped in a reporting class in a couple of days, and I can now pretty easily just throw some JS Structures at it, and have the tabular data printed out with headers and footers. I wish I could share it.

e98cuenc• 13 years ago

You can use the data url of the image, I made a small test here: http://cuenca-stuff.s3.amazonaws.com/jpgtopdf/index.html

(I don't know if by "base64" you mean "data url", which usually encodes the raw data in base64...)

HarrietJones3• 13 years ago

Heh - This was first posted to hacker news over 1500 days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=574854

aroman• 13 years ago

It has definitely been posted to HN numerous times in the past. However, it seems the reason it was posted again this time is because the jsPDF website had a major design revamp.

At least, it looks very different from when I last used it ~6 months ago.

hexagon• 13 years ago

Cannot get it to work for me. It shows only a blank page, both in the in-page viewer, and the saved document locally. I am on a linux Mint 15 and Firefox 23

brokenparser• 13 years ago

It's the same in Firefox Nightly 26.

fnordfnordfnord• 13 years ago

Same for FF 23.0.1 on Windows something or other.

dougk7• 13 years ago

Same on Chrome 24, using Ubuntu. I just copied the Download like directly and will play with it later. http://parall.ax/parallax/downloads/jsPDF-0.9.0rc2.zip

waldir3• 13 years ago

The version at http://mrrio.github.io/jsPDF/ works for me in FF23.

bachback• 13 years ago

AFAIK there is not a free lib which approach the commercial pdf generators. page-layouting can be complex.

sgt• 13 years ago

This is very interesting. Careful using only client-side technologies to generate PDFs though. What if down the line you get another user requirement, such as having a PDF generated and mailed to the user?

Assuming you are not using Node.js as a backend, that might pose a problem, and cause you to possibly maintain the logic for two separate PDF generators.

agumonkey• 13 years ago

Watching this under Firefox gives a nice JsPDF -> PDF.js homolinguistic loop.

unz4• 13 years ago

Slightly off-topic, Pdf and Ps are just plain outdated for today. They're unreadable on small screens and for people with bad eyesight, and no one sane prints stuff out these days Html is better, but the real thing today is tablet apps. All docs should be published as interactive 10/7/5 inch apps. Books should also disappear and be replaced by that form factor. Scientific paper authors also need to realize this and replace latex with app programming and publish their work as apps.

TheZenPsycho4• 13 years ago

Make documents available only as apps. This is a troll, right? You just gave us a very scary glimpse of the future.

voltagex_• 13 years ago

Zinio and other magazine apps already do this. They're either encrypted SWFs or PDFs on the backend.

zv• 13 years ago

The advantages for PDF is printing. You can't just set correctly page margins and other things with plain HTML.

unz4• 13 years ago

My point is - why is anyone printing anymore? Everyone can get their hands on a tablet these days

omaranto2• 13 years ago

As far as I can tell no file viewer or eBook reader tries to make browsing through a large file as convenient as physical page flipping. Electronic reading does let you find specific phrases, or go to an exact page number but browsing is still very inconvenient.

thinkersilver• 13 years ago

I've been using this library and I really like it. If only it could do svg, then embedding D3 charts would be a cinch. Keep up the good work, though.

sitharus• 13 years ago

Looks good, but the typesetting is a little off and I don't see any examples of paragraphs or line wrapping.

I built a PDF library for PHP many years ago and the hardest part was text, typesetting is a hard problem.

Looks good for exporting images and charts though.

RamiK• 13 years ago

Wouldn't a TeX engine written in Ecmascript make more sense?

A Web2JS of sorts maybe...

Though I'm more inclined towards using XeTeX since it solves a lot of problems without gluing a whole new language (LuaTex anyone?) in there.

FraaJad• 13 years ago

I believe someone posted a link to Speedata tool which uses LuaTeX. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6273668

waldir3• 13 years ago

Have you heard of https://github.com/manuels/texlive.js ?

pippy• 13 years ago

I much prefer wkhtmltopdf: https://wkhtmltopdf.googlecode.com/

It essentially allows you to make an HTML page and convert it to a PDF. It has powerful options around making footers, headers etc. The best part is you can run jQuery on it. It comes in handy when you don't know what the data will be like.

gluxon• 13 years ago

It's funny to see Firefox turn this back into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with PDF.js...

TheZenPsycho4• 13 years ago

Why isn't the api compatible (or at least sympathetic with) 2D canvas? If it could do that, you'd be able to reuse so much code.

ya3r• 13 years ago

This is really good. Specially the real-time rendering as one changes the code. But it does not work with Unicode (I tried farsi) characters.

Why does most of things related to PDF do not work with unicode characters?

talles• 13 years ago

Pretty useful, but didn't work on Firefox 23.0.1 here (just blank pdf).

On Chrome seems fine.

waldir3• 13 years ago

The version at http://mrrio.github.io/jsPDF/ works for me (on both Firefox and Chrome)

JsPDF - HTML5 PDF generator

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