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url2pdf3

Render URLs or HTML to a PDF or take a screenshot.

Can be used for generating bills, protocols, lists, etc. from a website.

url2pdf3 is the official successor of url2pdf-plus, with the following advantages7

  • Uses puppetteer (based on Chromium), not the deprecated PhantomJS
  • Actual wait events instead of unreliable timeout approach
  • Does not use temporary files you have to read but returns binary buffers
  • No temporary file cleanup process required (with-tmp-dir-promise)
  • Clean source code due to async/await

Installation

npm install url2pdf3 --save

Note that url2pdf3 requires NodeJS >= 7.6 due to heavy use of async/await.

In order to avoid experiencing missing native library issues like

/home/user/erp/node_modules/puppeteer/.local-chromium/linux-555668/chrome-linux/chrome: error while loading shared libraries: libX11-xcb.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

also install the native libraries that chrome needs.

sudo apt-get install gconf-service libasound2 libatk1.0-0 libc6 libcairo2 libcups2 libdbus-1-3 libexpat1 libfontconfig1 libgcc1 libgconf-2-4 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 libglib2.0-0 libgtk-3-0 libnspr4 libpango-1.0-0 libpangocairo-1.0-0 libstdc++6 libx11-6 libx11-xcb1 libxcb1 libxcomposite1 libxcursor1 libxdamage1 libxext6 libxfixes3 libxi6 libxrandr2 libxrender1 libxss1 libxtst6 ca-certificates fonts-liberation libappindicator1 libnss3 lsb-release xdg-utils wget ghostscript

Credits to @Coldner@ on the puppetteer issue tracker packages.

Getting started

node example-pdf.js
node example-screenshot.js

PDF from URL

const fs = require("mz/fs");
const url2pdf3 = require("url2pdf3");

url2pdf3.renderURL("https://www.google.com")
    .then(pdf => {
        fs.writeFile("mypdf.pdf", pdf).then(() =>
            console.log("See mypdf.pdf!")
        )
    });

Screenshot from URL

const fs = require("mz/fs");
const url2pdf3 = require("url2pdf3");

url2pdf3.renderURL("https://www.google.com", {screenshot: true})
    .then(pdf => {
        fs.writeFile("myscreenshot.png", pdf).then(() =>
            console.log("See myscreenshot.png!")
        )
    });

Render multiple URLs & automatically join the resulting pages

const fs = require("mz/fs");
const url2pdf3 = require("url2pdf3");

url2pdf3.renderURLs(["https://www.google.com", "https://wikipedia.org"])
    .then(pdf => {
        fs.writeFile("mypdf.pdf", pdf).then(() =>
            console.log("See mypdf.pdf!")
        )
    });

PDF From HTML String

Note that loading external resources from the HTML is possible.

const url2pdf3 = require("url2pdf3");
const fs = require("fs");
url2pdf3.renderHTML("<html><body><h1>HELLO WORLD</h1></body></html>")
    .then(function(pdf){
        fs.writeFile('output.pdf',pdf, function(err){
            if(err) {console.error(err)}
            else {console.log('saved pdf to output.pdf')}
        });
    });

Options

{
   // defaults
   format: 'A4',
   scale: 1.5,
   waitUntil: 'networkidle2', //
   margin: { // can be also just margin: '1cm'
      top: '1cm',
      left: '1cm',
      right: '1cm',
      bottom: '1cm'
   },
   pageOpts: { timeout: 60000 }, // Increases the timeout for loading page to 60 seconds
   

   // for debugging
   puppeteer:{
     headless: false,
     devtools: true
  }
}
  • url2pdf3 and puppeteer options are passed through
  • default options are supplemented and / or replaced with transferred options
  • now you can use puppeteerOpts e.g.: headerTemplate and displayHeaderFooter

Joining PDFs.

url2pdf-plus also supported joining PDFs but this functionality has now been rewritten and is now available in the pdf-toolz package.

Note that rendering multiple URLs and automatically concatenating the PDFs is supported.