pdf-light

An enterprise-grade, lightweight Node.js library to generate PDFs from HTML/Handlebars templates efficiently without using Puppeteer, Chromium, or any headless browser.

🚀 Why pdf-light?

• Zero Headless Browser: Drop the 300MB+ Chrome binary. Run on Lambda/Alpine effortlessly.
• Blazing Fast: Startup time is milliseconds, not seconds.
• Pure TypeScript: Type-safe and developer-friendly.
• Pixel Perfect Layouts: Use your specialized cursor layout engine for precise invoice generation.

Features

• Pure Node.js: No system dependencies, no browser installation required.
• Lightweight: Optimized for serverless (AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions) and containers.
• TypeScript: Written in strict TypeScript with full type definitions.
• HTML + CSS Subset: Support for common tags (div, p, h1-h6, img, span) and tables (table, tr, td).
• Handlebars Support: Built-in template rendering for dynamic data.
• Advanced Layout:
  • Automatic page breaks
  • Word wrapping
  • Margins and padding
  • Image embedding (JPG, PNG)

Installation

npm install pdf-light

Usage

import { generatePDF } from 'pdf-light';
import * as fs from 'fs';

const template = `
  <h1>Hello {{name}}!</h1>
  <p>This is a PDF generated without Chrome.</p>
`;

async function main() {
  const pdfBuffer = await generatePDF({
    html: template,
    data: { name: 'World' },
    layout: {
      pageSize: [595.28, 841.89], // A4
      marginTop: 50,
      marginBottom: 50,
      marginLeft: 50,
      marginRight: 50
    }
  });

  fs.writeFileSync('output.pdf', pdfBuffer);
}

main();

Supported HTML/CSS

Tags: h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, div, span, img, br, strong, b. Tables: table, thead, tbody, tr, td, th.

CSS Properties:

• font-size
• color (Hex or names like 'red', 'blue')
• text-align ('left', 'center', 'right')
• font-weight ('bold', 'normal')
• margin, margin-top, margin-bottom
• width (for tables/cells)
• padding, background-color, border-bottom

Performance

Compared to Puppeteer:

• Startup Time: < 50ms vs ~1000ms+
• Memory Usage: ~20MB vs ~1GB+
• Package Size: ~10MB vs ~300MB+

Limitations

• No flexbox or grid layout support yet.
• Limited CSS subset (no cascading stylesheets, mostly inline or basic tag defaults).
• Basic font support (Standard Fonts), custom font loading coming soon.

🤝 Contributing

We love your input! We want to make contributing to this project as easy and transparent as possible, whether it's:

• Reporting a bug
• Discussing the current state of the code
• Submitting a fix
• Proposing new features

Please see our CONTRIBUTING.md for details on our code of conduct, and the process for submitting pull requests to us.

Code of Conduct

We have adopted the Contributor Covenant as our Code of Conduct, and we expect project participants to adhere to it. Please read the full text so that you can understand what actions will and will not be tolerated.

License

ISC © 2025 Dhanuja Thishakya Samaranayake