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.

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 styling.
• 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.

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

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.

License

ISC © 2025 Dhanuja Thishakya Samaranayake