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Url2PDF

Grab a URL and convert the HTML to PDF using PhantomJS. Phantom renders the printing version. Can be used for generating bills, protocols, lists, etc. from a website.

Current State

Right now this project is in a bit of a pickle - PhantomJS, the headless browser it relies on has been discontinued. The excellent Puppeteer is the logical successor, however it is not a like-for-like drop in and has some annoying dependency issues on linux. In favour of not breaking our current enterprise applications that rely on this system, I recommend new users check out https://www.npmjs.com/package/url2pdf3 for the time being.

This does not mean that the project has been discontinued - I have a number of mission critical systems that rely on it personally, it just means that we are going to be very pragmatic about any big updates.

Installation

npm install url2pdf --save

Getting started

node examles.js

Then look into the project folder "pdfTemp"

API

PDF from URL

    var url2pdf = require("url2pdf");

    url2pdf.renderPdf("http://www.google.com")
    	.then(function(path){
	    	console.log("Rendered pdf @", path);
    	});

PDF From HTML String

So you have made your html in Jade etc and now you want to just turn it into a PDF without creating a whole website just for this purpose? Easy! Just do as below:

    var url2pdf = require("url2pdf");
    url2pdf.renderFromHTML("<html><body><h1>HELLO WORLD</h1></body></html>")
    	.then(function(path){
	    	console.log("Rendered pdf @", path);
    	});

In Express route as a download

    var url2pdf = require("url2pdf");

    function myRoute(req, res){
        url2pdf.renderPdf(url)
            .then(function (path) {
                res.sendFile(path);
            })
            .catch(function(err){
                res.status(500).json(err);
            })
    }

Manual cleanup

url2pdf comes with an auto cleanup function that will delete old files in your temp directory. For a manual cleanup disable the auto cleanup in the function call:

    url2pdf.renderFromHTML("htmlString ..." ,{
     autoCleanFileAgeInSec: -1 // set disabled in options
     }).then( ...

To clean the tmp folder call the following function, passing in the age in seconds you would like to delete:

    url2pdf.cleanUp(5); // clean up all files older than 5 seconds

Configuration options

You can set the configuration options globally by editing the url2pdf.opts object. The default settings are shown below

    {
      paperSize: {format: "A4", orientation: 'portrait', margin: '1cm'},
      saveDir: path.join(__dirname, "pdfTemp"), // path for temporary files
      idLength: 30 // file ID length; adjust to avoid conflicts or just get smaller filenames
      loadTimeout: 800, // in ms; time for rendering the page
      autoCleanFileAgeInSec: 24 * 3600 // [s]; older files are removed; set to "-1" to disable remove
    };

If you want to just edit the settings for one render, you can do this by passing in just the object fields you want to change as the second argument:

    url2pdf.renderPdf("http://www.google.com", {paperSize: {orientation: "landscape"}});

Notes

If you load a bigger webpage (images etc.), ensure, the loadTimeout is long enough to get everything!

Fonts/Page Too large?

There is a problem with PhantomJS related to this very long thread: ariya/phantomjs#12685

This is the hacky workaround for the moment:

    html {
        zoom: 0.55; /*workaround for phantomJS2 rendering pages too large*/
    }

Tests

Just run node example.js which runs the available functions. If you are contributing code - at the very least run it to make sure it all seems ok

Alternatives

In adding this to another project I discovered the community has extended the project. While I am still using this in production at the time of this edit, there hasn't been a flurry of upgrades because it just keeps working.

However you might also want to check out these projects that have built on url2pdf: https://www.npmjs.com/package/url2pdf3

https://www.npmjs.com/package/url2pdf-plus (now deprecated in favour of url2pdf3 but apparently has some features not moved forward)