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.
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. It also comes with predefined templates which you can reuse and edit.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. We also compared them in different properties like complexity, size of generated files, resolution and Features.įinally, if you want to have a tool with all the features of these libraries and more, in that case, I recommend that you check out APITemplate.io, which is a tool that can help you generate PDFs quickly with PDF generating API over the cloud and totally compatible with CSS and JavaScript. We had a brief introduction to some of the tools/ libraries like jsPDF, html2pdf, puppeteer and pdf-lib. Throughout this article, We discussed various ways to export your web page into pdf. Finally, Regarding library features, we will find that pdf-lib supports more features than the other libraries, like creating and editing documents and forms. Another disadvantage for Puppeteer will shine as the tool only supports Chrome, and all other browsers are still a work in progress. One of the most important features when selecting the tool/library is its compatibility with browsers. The reason is that html2pdf and jsPDF take a screenshot of the website content, which cause the text to appear blurry in some cases.Ī method to eliminate this blurriness is to configure the html2pdf to use PNG instead of JPEG format, but this will increase the generated PDF file size significantly or use larger resolution when configuring html2pdf. When comparing the generated files, we will find that the Puppeteer generates high-resolution files with small size and selectable text while jsPDF and html2pdf generate bigger file sizes with low resolution, and you can’t select the text on them. In comparison, Puppeteer is the least complex tool to automate any browser task, not just converting the webpage into PDF.
On the complexity scale, the jsPDF library is too complex to master because all the elements must be manually encoded, followed by pdf-lib. All the other libraries work well on the client-side. Puppeteer is a Node library that only enables the user to control headless Chrome using APIs.
In that case, the Puppeteer is not a suitable tool for you. Suppose we need to have a tool that runs only on the client-side and doesn’t need to allocate resources on the server-side. You can read more about pdf-lib from here Which one is suitable for me?Īnswering this question depends on our needs.
It simply creates a pdf page and applies your formatting to the page.Īn example of using the jsPDF with JavaScript: function generatePDF() We can start by introducing jsPDF, jsPDF is an open-source library for generating pdf using only JavaScript. There are many libraries and tools available we can use to convert this invoice from HTML format to PDF, and Here we will explore some of the most popular libraries among them. Furthermore, we want this invoice to be well-formatted to be printed. Suppose we have an invoice that we want our customer to be able to print. Subscribe to get notified when a new article is published. A guide to generating PDFs in JavaScript.
This article is part of a series of articles on how to generate PDFs using different programming languages: With this need in mind, This article will explore different JavaScript libraries for converting HTML to PDF online and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each library to help you choose the suitable tool for your application.
As your data is dynamic in most cases, as the invoice example we introduced earlier, the most suitable way to handle the data and the conversion is to use JavaScript as it provides you with the ability to deal with the data dynamically.