🖥️ HTML2PDF

An easy-to-use but reliable asynchronous library to create highly customizable PDFs from HTML or URL as buffer, base64 string and .pdf file. Other than most npm-solutions for html-to-pdf conversion, this one leverages puppeteer as opposed to the deprecated and unmaintained phantomJS. It also provides far more options to configure to your liking than most similar solutions. This might be the best html-to-pdf solution on npm at this point.

Installation

npm i [-g] better-html-pdf

Available functions

Other than the main converter function, HTML2PDF exposes two more functions that allow writing pdf file content as both base64 or buffer. Those functions are also used internally to replace the situationally unreliable puppeteer-native file save function that is controlled through the path option.

Function signatures

Convert html to pdf

html2pdf(html: string, options: Object) : Promise<string | Buffer>

Convert base64 file content to PDF file

base64ToPdf(base64: string, file: string) : void

Convert file content buffer to PDF file

bufferToPdf(buffer: Buffer, file: string) : void

Usage

Using HTML2PDF is quick and simple: Import the html2pdf function and pass it the html and options.

const { html2pdf, base64ToPdf, bufferToPdf } = require('better-html-pdf');

//[...]
// convert html to PDF
const fileContentB64 = await html2pdf('<h1>Test</h1>', { avoidTableRowBreak: true, marginTop: 10, repeatTableHeader: false });
const fileContentBuffer = await html2pdf('<h1>Test</h1>', { fileType: 'buffer', url: 'https://google.com/', viewPort: '1000x700' });

//convert output to pdf file
base64ToPdf(fileContentB64, './test1.pdf');
bufferToPdf(fileContentBuffer, './test2.pdf');

Full type declarations are included so ES6 imports are available, too.

import { html2pdf } from 'better-html-pdf';

//[...]
// convert html to PDF
const fileContentB64 = await html2pdf('<h1>Test</h1>', { avoidTableRowBreak: true, marginTop: 10, repeatTableHeader: false });

Options

This solution provides a great number of options to configure for your conversion, passed as a javascript object. Find a detailed doc of all options and defaults here: Options Documentation.

{
    fileType: 'base64', // 'base64' | 'buffer'
    url: '', //if specified ignores html
    viewPort: '1920x1080', //string (width)x(height)
    timeout: 5000, //timeout for page loading in ms
    landscape: false,
    format: '', //letter | legal | tabloid | ledger | a0 | a1 | a2 | a3 | a4 | a5 | a6
    repeatTableHeader: true, //repeat html table headers on each page - note: headers only repeat when in <thead>
    repeatTableFooter: true, //repeat html table footers on each page - note: footers only repeat when in <tfoot>
    displayHeaderFooter: true,
    headerTemplate: '',
    footerTemplate: '',
    width: '1920', //document size in pixels or with units (in, mm, cm)
    height: '1080', //document size in pixels or with units (in, mm, cm)
    marginTop: 0, //num in pixels or with units (in, mm, cm)
    marginBottom: 0, //num in pixels or with units (in, mm, cm)
    marginLeft: 0, //num in pixels or with units (in, mm, cm)
    marginRight: 0, //num in pixels or with units (in, mm, cm)
    breakImages: false, //break images between pages
    avoidTableRowBreak: true, //tries avoiding breaking table rows between pages
    avoidDivBreak: false, //tries to avoid breaking divs between pages - can cause unwanted behavior
    omitBackground: false, //hide html background, allows for transparency
    pageRanges: '', //'1-12' | '3-5'
    path: '', //file save path, if empty no file is created
    disableJavascript: false, //disable javascript on the target site/html
    preferCSSPageSize: false, //css-declared page size takes precedent over format, width and height
    printBackground: true, //apply background styling
    trueColors: true, //use unaltered colors
    scale: 1, //render scale, must be between 0.1 and 2
    screenMedia: false //use 'screen' instead of 'print' CSS media
}

Dependencies

HTML2PDF depends on puppeteer.