pdf-lib

pdf-lib is a library for creating and modifying PDF documents in any modern JavaScript runtime, including Node, Browser, Deno, and React Native.

Key capabilities include:

• Document Manipulation: Create new PDFs, modify existing ones, add, insert, or remove pages, and copy pages between documents.
• Form Handling: Create, fill, and flatten PDF forms.
• Drawing & Content: Draw text, images (PNG/JPEG), PDF pages, vector graphics, and SVG paths. It also supports measuring text width and height.
• Fonts: Embed fonts with support for UTF-8 and UTF-16 character sets.
• Metadata & Preferences: Set and read document metadata and viewer preferences.
• Attachments: Add attachments to PDF documents.

Before using pdf-lib, be aware of the following functional limitations:

• Text Extraction/Editing: You can extract or edit text within form fields (using PDFTextField.getText or PDFTextField.setText), but you cannot extract or edit plain text that exists on a page outside of a form field.
• HTML/CSS Support: pdf-lib does not support HTML or CSS. You cannot use HTML/CSS to add content to or embed content into a PDF. If you require HTML-to-PDF capabilities, consider using Puppeteer.
• Encryption: As noted in the encryption handling section, pdf-lib does not support encrypted documents for modification.

To support embedding custom fonts, you must install the @pdf-lib/fontkit module and register it with your PDFDocument instance using pdfDoc.registerFontkit(fontkit) before attempting to embed custom fonts.

# With npm
npm install --save @pdf-lib/fontkit

# With yarn
yarn add @pdf-lib/fontkit

import { PDFDocument } from 'pdf-lib'
import fontkit from '@pdf-lib/fontkit'

const pdfDoc = await PDFDocument.create()
pdfDoc.registerFontkit(fontkit)

To use the included CSS rules for Fantasque fonts, you must upload the following files into the same folder:

1. All contents from the Webfonts/ directory.
2. All .ttf files located in the archive's root.
3. All .otf files located in the OTF/ folder.

Integration tests are located in the apps/ directory and ensure the project works across different JavaScript environments. Note: You must run yarn build to compile the code before running these tests.

• Node.js: yarn apps:node (follow terminal prompts)
• Deno: yarn apps:deno (follow terminal prompts)
• Browser: yarn apps:web (open http://localhost:8080/apps/web/test1.html in your browser)
• React Native (iOS): yarn apps:rn:ios (use the simulator)
• React Native (Android):

  adb reverse tcp:8080 tcp:8080
  yarn apps:rn:android

yarn apps:node
yarn apps:deno
yarn apps:web
yarn apps:rn:ios
abd reverse tcp:8080 tcp:8080
yarn apps:rn:android

Unit tests are located in the tests directory and are managed by the Jest framework. To verify your changes, run:

yarn test

In v1.0.0, drawing content is simplified. Instead of manually creating and registering content streams, you can call drawing methods directly on a PDFPage instance.

Supported methods include:

• PDFPage.drawText
• PDFPage.drawImage
• PDFPage.drawRectangle
• PDFPage.drawSvgPath

page.drawText('Creating PDFs in JavaScript is awesome!', {
  x: 50,
  y: 450,
  size: 15,
  font: timesRomanFont,
  color: rgb(0, 0.53, 0.71),
});

To use pdf-lib in a Node.js or web project with a package manager, install the latest stable version using npm or yarn.

# With npm
npm install --save pdf-lib

# With yarn
yarn add pdf-lib

pdf-lib supports the Deno runtime. To use it, import pdf-lib and @pdf-lib/fontkit via a CDN like Skypack, as Deno requires module references via URLs.

To create a document in Deno:

import {
  PDFDocument,
  StandardFonts,
  rgb,
} from 'https://cdn.skypack.dev/pdf-lib@^1.11.1?dts';

const pdfDoc = await PDFDocument.create();
const timesRomanFont = await pdfDoc.embedFont(StandardFonts.TimesRoman);

const page = pdfDoc.addPage();
const { width, height } = page.getSize();
const fontSize = 30;
page.drawText('Creating PDFs in JavaScript is awesome!', {
  x: 50,
  y: height - 4 * fontSize,
  size: fontSize,
  font: timesRomanFont,
  color: rgb(0, 0.53, 0.71),
});

const pdfBytes = await pdfDoc.save();

await Deno.writeFile('out.pdf', pdfBytes);

Execute the script using: deno run --allow-write <filename>.ts

To use characters outside the Latin alphabet (Unicode), you must embed a custom font. This requires loading the font data (e.g., from a file or network request) and passing it to embedFont. You must also register fontkit using pdfDoc.registerFontkit(fontkit) to support advanced font features.

import { PDFDocument } from 'pdf-lib'
import fontkit from '@pdf-lib/fontkit'

const url = 'https://pdf-lib.js.org/assets/ubuntu/Ubuntu-R.ttf'
const fontBytes = await fetch(url).then((res) => res.arrayBuffer())

const pdfDoc = await PDFDocument.create()

pdfDoc.registerFontkit(fontkit)
const ubuntuFont = await pdfDoc.embedFont(fontBytes)

const page = pdfDoc.addPage()
page.drawText('Some fancy Unicode text in the ŪЬȕǹƚü font', {
  font: ubuntuFont,
})