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Show HN: TinyPDF – 3kb pdf library (70x smaller than jsPDF)
I needed to generate invoices in a Node.js app. jsPDF is 229KB. I only needed text, rectangles, lines, and JPEG images.
So I wrote tinypdf: <400 lines of TypeScript, zero dependencies, 3.3KB minified+gzipped.
What it does:
- Text (Helvetica, colors, alignment)
- Rectangles and lines
- JPEG images
- Multiple pages, custom sizes
What it doesn't do:
- Custom fonts, PNG/SVG, forms, encryption, HTML-to-PDF
That's it. The 95% use case for invoices, receipts, reports, tickets, and labels.
GitHub: https://github.com/Lulzx/tinypdf
npm: npm install tinypdf
- IntelliAvatar 9mo ago3KB is wild. What features did you intentionally leave out to get this small?
- wonger_ 9mo agoNot the author, but generating PDFs is much, much simpler than parsing PDFs
- IntelliAvatar 9mo agoThat makes sense. I was mostly curious about what explicit trade-offs the author chose beyond “generation only” — e.g. fonts, Unicode, images, compression, etc. Would be interesting to see a concrete “not supported” list from the author.
- lysace 9mo agoSupport for more than 7-bit ASCII characters. :)
- teaearlgraycold 9mo agoIt only supports Helvetica!
- hu3 9mo agoutf-8
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- anilgulecha 9mo agoGreat exercize, but for most use cases - people will continue reaching for jsPDF. I think if you have a markdown->PDF function included, where I can send in markdown and get PDF, that would solve quite many needs, and would be useful.
- lulzx 9mo agoI have added it!
- nebezb 9mo agoWow you’re not kidding. That was fast. https://github.com/Lulzx/tinypdf/commit/961e6b602f19e125f210500812aa81e49de1ac41 https://github.com/Lulzx/tinypdf/commit/961e6b602f19e125f210...
- pylotlight 9mo agoHTML -> PDF was also a use case I've used previously FYI
- croisillon 9mo agois it related to one of the other 10 products called TinyPDF?
- esafak 9mo agoYes, obviously: it's a tiny PDF library.
- andai 9mo agoBack in the day I needed PDF export for some client thing. I can't remember if I was using pdfjs or jspdf. I do however remember that it was many thousands of lines of code, and yet, I had to lay out the lines of text on the page manually. My page layout code was like 50 lines of code. And I remember thinking... OK they already wrote 8,000 lines of code... They couldn't have added 50 more?! 400 lines though. Respect. I will take a proper look at this when I recover from burnout :)
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- wg0 9mo agoSo essentially - it only works with Latin script? Because without fonts, every other script is NOT going to render.
- jbaiter 9mo agoAgree, the lack of support for TTF fonts is a bummer for most non-english use cases:-/
- RodgerTheGreat 9mo agoIt's definitely far easier to emit a controlled, useful subset of PDF than it is to parse PDF documents. I wrote a small PDF library for the Decker ecosystem that just focuses on bitmaps and page layout; roughly 4kb and 135 LoC. docs/demos: https://beyondloom.com/decker/pdf.html https://beyondloom.com/decker/pdf.html browsable source: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Decker/blob/main/examples/decks/pdf.deck#L142-L276 https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Decker/blob/main/examples/dec...
- kuschkufan 9mo agoThis decker stuff is pretty nifty too
- user3939382 9mo agoI’m working on one rn. It takes arbitrary PDFs and builds composable dynamic pandoc pipelines to match the source byte for byte output. It’s very very complex. But if I can get it finished it will fuck over Adobe so worth it.
- culi 9mo agoWhile not quite as small as 3kb, I recently found this incredible library called html-to-image that's only 300kb. It clones whatever subtree of your document you want to a <foreignObject> inside an svg which then allows it to output canvas, png, svg, pdf, blob, jpeg, etc. Even more impressively is that it handles custom fonts, pseudo-elements, computed styles and more. https://github.com/bubkoo/html-to-image https://github.com/bubkoo/html-to-image It's probably the most impressive and seamless experience I've had with converting HTML to pdfs/images so I just wanted to sing its praises here
- normie3000 9mo agoIt does sound very cool, but I don't think it exports to PDF: https://github.com/bubkoo/html-to-image/issues/327 https://github.com/bubkoo/html-to-image/issues/327
- culi 9mo agoOh my, you're right. I've actually only tried it for exporting to images. Sorry for the misleading comment!
- layer8 9mo agoOnly supports ASCII characters, which is part of the trick here. As soon as you need more Unicode (even just typographic quote characters and such), you’ll need significantly more logic. Also no bold, italics, etc.
- raybb 9mo agoWas Typst falling short in any particular area that made you not want to use it? (If it was on your radar at all). I think it would work for your use case and could also run client side if needed. Here's the TS library: https://github.com/Myriad-Dreamin/typst.ts https://github.com/Myriad-Dreamin/typst.ts
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- winterec 9mo agoGreat work thanks for sharing. I've been looking for something like this for generating invoice PDFs without bloat.
- copypaper 9mo agoNice work! I'm curious though, what was your use case for needing a smaller library? Since you're running this on a server, what difference does an extra 226KB make?
- lulzx 9mo agoon cloudflare workers, the bundle limit makes 226KB massive.
- kentonv 9mo agoFWIW, the limit these days is 10MB (after compression). https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits/ That said, thank you for fighting library bloat! Small libraries tend to perform better (not just on Workers but in general).
- userbinator 9mo agoI still have a tiny DOS binary (x86 Asm) that I wrote decades ago for turning plaintext ASCII files into PDFs, for those annoying use-cases where the former isn't accepted but the latter is. It's only a few hundred bytes, with the majority being data to be copied verbatim into the output file.
- dzrmb 9mo agoI actually was battling jsPDF the other day so definitely need to give this a try, thanks!
- nanis 9mo agoHTML + CSS works great for this kind of thing. Once you get the print scope correct, you really never need to think about it again.
- ErroneousBosh 9mo agoHeh, no stars when I first looked and though "hey I'll star this" and now 300 ;-)
- alexpadula 9mo agoWell ain’t that a useful 400 lines of code eh! Good work
- niutech 9mo agoWhy not generate good old RTF files instead of PDF? They are much simpler and support more than ASCII charset.