A PDF document is made up of several sections:
- A one-line header identifying the version of the PDF specification to which thefile conforms
- A body containing the objects that make up the document contained in the file
- A cross-reference table containing information about the indirect objects in the file
- A trailer giving the location of the cross-reference table and of certain specialobjects within the body of the file
The following code is an actual Hello World PDF document from this tutorial. The full guide on Understanding the PDF File Format from Leon Atherton will provide a detailed and simple answer to all of your questions.
There is also a huge Portable Document Format reference book from Adobe, if you really want to understand how it works.
The official pdf specification has been an ISO norm since 2008, ISO 32000-1; Adobe provides a copy thereof on their web site with merely the official ISO headers replaced: PDF32000_2008.pdf. Meanwhile (2018) ISO has published an updated version, ISO 32000-2.
Create a .txt file, open it in your favourite editor, paste this code. Then, change the extension to .pdf. You will see a working PDF document.
%PDF-1.4
1 0 obj <</Type /Catalog /Pages 2 0 R>>
endobj
2 0 obj <</Type /Pages /Kids [3 0 R] /Count 1>>
endobj
3 0 obj<</Type /Page /Parent 2 0 R /Resources 4 0 R /MediaBox [0 0 500 800] /Contents 6 0 R>>
endobj
4 0 obj<</Font <</F1 5 0 R>>>>
endobj
5 0 obj<</Type /Font /Subtype /Type1 /BaseFont /Helvetica>>
endobj
6 0 obj
<</Length 44>>
stream
BT /F1 24 Tf 175 720 Td (Hello World!)Tj ET
endstream
endobj
xref
0 7
0000000000 65535 f
0000000009 00000 n
0000000056 00000 n
0000000111 00000 n
0000000212 00000 n
0000000250 00000 n
0000000317 00000 n
trailer <</Size 7/Root 1 0 R>>
startxref
406
%%EOF
A PDF document is made up of several sections:
- A one-line header identifying the version of the PDF specification to which thefile conforms
- A body containing the objects that make up the document contained in the file
- A cross-reference table containing information about the indirect objects in the file
- A trailer giving the location of the cross-reference table and of certain specialobjects within the body of the file
The following code is an actual Hello World PDF document from this tutorial. The full guide on Understanding the PDF File Format from Leon Atherton will provide a detailed and simple answer to all of your questions.
There is also a huge Portable Document Format reference book from Adobe, if you really want to understand how it works.
The official pdf specification has been an ISO norm since 2008, ISO 32000-1; Adobe provides a copy thereof on their web site with merely the official ISO headers replaced: PDF32000_2008.pdf. Meanwhile (2018) ISO has published an updated version, ISO 32000-2.
Create a .txt file, open it in your favourite editor, paste this code. Then, change the extension to .pdf. You will see a working PDF document.
%PDF-1.4
1 0 obj <</Type /Catalog /Pages 2 0 R>>
endobj
2 0 obj <</Type /Pages /Kids [3 0 R] /Count 1>>
endobj
3 0 obj<</Type /Page /Parent 2 0 R /Resources 4 0 R /MediaBox [0 0 500 800] /Contents 6 0 R>>
endobj
4 0 obj<</Font <</F1 5 0 R>>>>
endobj
5 0 obj<</Type /Font /Subtype /Type1 /BaseFont /Helvetica>>
endobj
6 0 obj
<</Length 44>>
stream
BT /F1 24 Tf 175 720 Td (Hello World!)Tj ET
endstream
endobj
xref
0 7
0000000000 65535 f
0000000009 00000 n
0000000056 00000 n
0000000111 00000 n
0000000212 00000 n
0000000250 00000 n
0000000317 00000 n
trailer <</Size 7/Root 1 0 R>>
startxref
406
%%EOF
If you don't need some advanced features, you can use this:
// Create a new window
const printWindow = window.open('', '', 'height=600,width=800');
// Get the content you want to export
const content = document.getElementById('content-to-export').outerHTML;
// Write the content to the new window
printWindow.document.write('<html><head><title>Export as PDF</title>');
printWindow.document.write('<style>body { font-family: Arial, sans-serif; }</style>');
printWindow.document.write('</head><body>');
printWindow.document.write(content);
printWindow.document.write('</body></html>');
// Close the document to finish writing
printWindow.document.close();
// Wait for the content to load and then print
printWindow.onload = function () {
printWindow.print();
printWindow.close();
};
Basically what it will do is:
- Write the HTML content to a new window
- Apply some basic styling using inline CSS
- Trigger the print dialog of the browser and the user will be able to save the PDF file
I like this solution because everything is native. For example, if you try to export a big data, it will split it into multiple PDF pages and you don't have to manage it.
When you will export it as PDF, browsers default styling will be applied. If you are trying to export a table or other styled elements, you can customise your inline CSS like this:
printWindow.document.write(`<style>
body { font-family: Arial, sans-serif; }
table { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 20px 0; }
th, td { border: 1px solid #ddd; padding: 8px; text-align: left; }
th { background-color: #f2f2f2; }
</style>`);
Or instead, as it is a basic HTML, you can import your own CSS file with link tag.
Videos
If all you need is the CDN then simply add it after the </body>
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/html2pdf.js/0.10.1/html2pdf.bundle.min.js" integrity="sha512-GsLlZN/3F2ErC5ifS5QtgpiJtWd43JWSuIgh7mbzZ8zBps+dvLusV+eNQATqgA/HdeKFVgA5v3S/cIrLF7QnIg==" crossorigin="anonymous" referrerpolicy="no-referrer"></script>
function generatePDF() {
const element = document.getElementById("pageprint");
document.getElementById("reportbox").style.display = "block";
document.getElementById("reportbox").style.marginTop = "0px";
document.getElementById("pageprint").style.border = "1px solid black";
html2pdf().from(element).save('download.pdf');
}
function downloadCode(){
var x = document.getElementById("reportbox");
generatePDF();
setTimeout(function() { window.location=window.location;},3000);}
<div id="pageprint">
<div id="reportbox">Hello World!!</div>
</div>
<button type="button" onclick="downloadCode();">Download HTML</button>
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/html2pdf.js/0.10.1/html2pdf.bundle.min.js"></script>However seems a very odd way to ask a user to download a pdf page since the option disappears after the download is attempted, so change of mind does not keep it user visible to try differently on fail.
So for example, I say open the download on current page, I see
but if I say open in PDF Viewer I see
It's much simpler to layout the printable HTML page as text not image, and suggest the user prints or saves exactly as their browser is configured and their desire, best result for all, especially as no libraries are needed.
Nor will the page be cluttered by buttons.
There isn't an easy way to do this. The best thing you could do is to open an empty page, fill it with your html data and print it to pdf. Or look for some external libary like jsPDF.
example for print to pdf:
var wnd = window.open('about:blank', '', '_blank');
wnd.document.write("<p> Some HTML-Content </p> ");
wnd.print();Hey everyone! I have an app that frequently needs to generate PDFs that look very similar to the original pages. Currently, we use html2pdf on the client-side, which works well for most things, but we've noticed that tables are a weak spot for this library.
I'm now exploring a server-side approach using Puppeteer, but I'm worried about the waiting time, particularly because many of the pages I need to print require authentication and may take a few seconds to load. This is causing the PDF generation process to take longer than we'd like.
Do you think that Puppeteer is still the best solution, and I just need to make some adjustments, or is there another way to tackle this problem?
PS: I already looked on some of the past posts on this topic, but all of them seem to be all 3+ years old, so some things might have changed since.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions or advice!
So, I'm trying to generate a PDF file from a Microsoft SharePoint list. The usual method of using CTRL+P doesn't work properly because the information is spread across multiple pages. My idea is to create a "1-page model file" where I have tables for all the user information. This way, I can fill in the blank spaces and then extract it to a PDF. Is that even possible?
jsPDF is able to use plugins. In order to enable it to print HTML, you have to include certain plugins and therefore have to do the following:
- Go to https://github.com/MrRio/jsPDF and download the latest Version.
- Include the following Scripts in your project:
- jspdf.js
- jspdf.plugin.from_html.js
- jspdf.plugin.split_text_to_size.js
- jspdf.plugin.standard_fonts_metrics.js
If you want to ignore certain elements, you have to mark them with an ID, which you can then ignore in a special element handler of jsPDF. Therefore your HTML should look like this:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
<p id="ignorePDF">don't print this to pdf</p>
<div>
<p><font size="3" color="red">print this to pdf</font></p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Then you use the following JavaScript code to open the created PDF in a PopUp:
var doc = new jsPDF();
var elementHandler = {
'#ignorePDF': function (element, renderer) {
return true;
}
};
var source = window.document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0];
doc.fromHTML(
source,
15,
15,
{
'width': 180,'elementHandlers': elementHandler
});
doc.output("dataurlnewwindow");
For me this created a nice and tidy PDF that only included the line 'print this to pdf'.
Please note that the special element handlers only deal with IDs in the current version, which is also stated in a GitHub Issue. It states:
Because the matching is done against every element in the node tree, my desire was to make it as fast as possible. In that case, it meant "Only element IDs are matched" The element IDs are still done in jQuery style "#id", but it does not mean that all jQuery selectors are supported.
Therefore replacing '#ignorePDF' with class selectors like '.ignorePDF' did not work for me. Instead you will have to add the same handler for each and every element, which you want to ignore like:
var elementHandler = {
'#ignoreElement': function (element, renderer) {
return true;
},
'#anotherIdToBeIgnored': function (element, renderer) {
return true;
}
};
From the examples it is also stated that it is possible to select tags like 'a' or 'li'. That might be a little bit to unrestrictive for the most usecases though:
We support special element handlers. Register them with jQuery-style ID selector for either ID or node name. ("#iAmID", "div", "span" etc.) There is no support for any other type of selectors (class, of compound) at this time.
One very important thing to add is that you lose all your style information (CSS). Luckily jsPDF is able to nicely format h1, h2, h3 etc., which was enough for my purposes. Additionally it will only print text within text nodes, which means that it will not print the values of textareas and the like. Example:
<body>
<ul>
<!-- This is printed as the element contains a textnode -->
<li>Print me!</li>
</ul>
<div>
<!-- This is not printed because jsPDF doesn't deal with the value attribute -->
<input type="text" value="Please print me, too!">
</div>
</body>
This is the simple solution. This works for me. You can use the javascript print concept and simple save this as pdf.
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title></title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.3/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$("#btnPrint").live("click", function () {
var divContents = $("#dvContainer").html();
var printWindow = window.open('', '', 'height=400,width=800');
printWindow.document.write('<html><head><title>DIV Contents</title>');
printWindow.document.write('</head><body >');
printWindow.document.write(divContents);
printWindow.document.write('</body></html>');
printWindow.document.close();
printWindow.print();
});
</script>
</head>
<body>
<form id="form1">
<div id="dvContainer">
This content needs to be printed.
</div>
<input type="button" value="Print Div Contents" id="btnPrint" />
</form>
</body>
</html>
We are implementing a service that should generate PDF invoices for our clients.
Initally we are thinking about doing it using Node with puppeteer, but the first version of the service is really slow (1 second to generate a simple PDF with a header, footer and a table with product details). So I'm worried because PDF generation seems like a very CPU intensive task so I don't know if the service will handle well the concurrent request it will receive (aprox. 50 per second).
Does anyone uses node and puppeteer for this in a prod enviroment?