pdf-lib VS gotenberg

I'm facing that same pain point of programmatic PDF filling. I noodled around in the PDF format and learned it's a bit difficult to deal with fonts and formatting. But I think this client-side library works well enough, as a start: https://pdf-lib.js.org/#:~:text=a%20single%20document.-,Fill...

I've also heard of one paid API that I forgot but seemed to work well, and this related service https://www.jotform.com/, and I also considered porting some server-side libraries to WASM. One day I'll collect all the libraries and findings in a blog post.

Are you looking to programmatically fill any PDF form by detecting the fields? Or are you filling one known PDF template?

Thanks! For PDF form filling, I use the APIs that pdf-lib [0] exposes. That includes text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdowns and options lists. Give it a try and let me know if you find a type of form field that's missing.

[0] https://github.com/Hopding/pdf-lib

I do not know if some plugin exists, but maybe you have to take a look at https://pdf-lib.js.org/

PDFmake or pdf-lib would be the way to go in my opinion.

Sure! You can build your own PDF editor with a combination of PDF.js and PDF-lib

I stand on the shoulders of giants, namely PDF-lib, PDF-js and React-beautiful-DND – everything else is pretty much custom code.

How one can use a library such as PDF-Lib (npm, website) that:

I built my side-project https://pdfvise.com/ using https://pdf-lib.js.org/ for pdf manipulations.

Use a server-side headless browser such as puppeteer to convert the HTML to PDF. This is the most reliable free option, but requires a server. If you need to use it in production, we recommend you use Gotenberg.

We're using Gotenberg[1] to convert a rendered web page (with Elixir/Phoenix, in our case) to PDF. Works like a charm and we can use our existing frontend code/styling (including SVG graph generators) which is a huge bonus.

1: https://gotenberg.dev/

If you also want to convert Markdown or LibreOffice formats, the self-hosted API Gotenberg is worth checking out

I found a project that does exactly that (https://github.com/gotenberg/gotenberg). It’s my best bet for now, but I still need to test GraalVM integration with JS runtimes (and test JS libraries) and the Kotlin compiler targeting Node.

Gotenberg is a Docker-based stateless API for PDF generation from HTML and Markdown files.

Think you mean https://gotenberg.dev ?

We use https://gotenberg.dev/ with handlebars templates.