Generating a PDF with Express & Node.js 📄🚀

In this article you’ll find a fun little tutorial 🎉 of how to create a PDF file using a web form, Express 🖥️ and PDFKit. To get started it’ll use the express generator and after completing it you’ll have a simple web form that generates a PDF file 📄 if the user clicks on the button Create PDF.

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📌 Setup Your Project

• Install Express Generator:

npm install -g express-generator

• Create a new Express app with Pug:

express --view=pug pdf-app

• Navigate into the project and install dependencies:

cd pdf-app  
npm install  

• Install the dependency PDFKit:

npm install pdfkit

You can now start your app, using:

npm start

Then go to http://localhost:3000 in your browser. You should see something like: “Welcome to Express”.

Next we’re going to add our HTML using the templating engine Pug (formerly known as Jade). Open the file views/index.pug and replace the existing code with the following:

extends layout
block content
  .row
    .col-md-8
      h1="Create a PDF"
      form.form-horizontal.well(method="post", action="/pdf")
          .form-group
              label.col-md-2.control-label File Name
              .col-md-10
                .input-group
                  input.form-control(type="text", name="filename", placeholder="File Name")
                  .input-group-addon=".pdf"
          .form-group
              label.col-md-2.control-label Text
              .col-md-10
                textarea.form-control(name="content", placeholder="Write some text for on your PDF!")
          .form-group
              .col-sm-offset-2.col-sm-10
                input.btn.btn-default(type="submit", value="Create PDF")

We also want to add some styling using Bootstrap and a theme from Bootswatch. In views/layout.pug add the following link directly above the existing link to style.css:

doctype html
html
  head
    title= title
    //link(rel='stylesheet', href='https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/bootswatch/3.3.6/flatly/bootstrap.min.css')
    link(rel='stylesheet', href='/stylesheets/style.css')
  body
    block content

Now if you restart your app and visit http://localhost:3000 you should see a nicely formatted HTML form. Next we’re going to add the route for creating PDF files. Create the file routes/pdf and add the following code:

const express = require('express')
const router = express.Router()
const PDFDocument = require('pdfkit')

router.post('/', (req, res) => {
  const doc = new PDFDocument()
  let filename = req.body.filename
  // Stripping special characters
  filename = encodeURIComponent(filename) + '.pdf'
  // Setting response to 'attachment' (download).
  // If you use 'inline' here it will automatically open the PDF
  res.setHeader('Content-disposition', 'attachment; filename="' + filename + '"')
  res.setHeader('Content-type', 'application/pdf')
  const content = req.body.content
  doc.y = 300
  doc.text(content, 50, 50)
  doc.pipe(res)
  doc.end()
})

module.exports = router

Then open app.js and require the new pdf route file just below the existing routes and add it as a route:

...
var index = require('./routes/index');
var users = require('./routes/users');
var pdf = require('./routes/pdf'); // <-- add this line
...
app.use('/', index);
app.use('/users', users);
app.use('/pdf', pdf); // <-- add this line
...

Your PDF rendering Express application is now ready for use! Start it with:

npm start

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial 😊 and feel free to ask me any questions.

Thanks to Samer Buna for reviewing this!🙌