html-to-pdfmake

Convert HTML to PDFMake format with ease. This library bridges the gap between HTML content and PDFMake document definitions, allowing you to generate PDFs from basic HTML while maintaining based styling and structure.

Note: if you need to convert a complex HTML, check some online solutions, like Doppio, or you could try to convert your HTML to canvas and then to export it to PDF.

Features

Convert HTML to PDFMake-compatible format
Preserve basic styling and structure
Support for tables, lists, images, and more
Customizable styling options
Works in both browser and Node.js environments
Handle nested elements
Custom tag support
Image handling with reference support

Online Demo

Try it live with the online demo.

Quick Start

Browser Usage

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <!-- Include required libraries -->
  <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/pdfmake@latest/build/pdfmake.min.js"></script>
  <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/pdfmake@latest/build/vfs_fonts.min.js"></script>
  <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/html-to-pdfmake/browser.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
  <script>
    // Convert HTML to PDFMake format
    const html = `
      <div>
        <h1>Sample Document</h1>
        <p>This is a <strong>simple</strong> example with <em>formatted</em> text.</p>
      </div>
    `;
    
    const converted = htmlToPdfmake(html);
    const docDefinition = { content: converted };
    
    // Generate PDF
    pdfMake.createPdf(docDefinition).download('document.pdf');
  </script>
</body>
</html>

Node.js Usage

npm install html-to-pdfmake jsdom

const pdfMake = require('pdfmake/build/pdfmake');
const pdfFonts = require('pdfmake/build/vfs_fonts');
const htmlToPdfmake = require('html-to-pdfmake');
const jsdom = require('jsdom');
const { JSDOM } = jsdom;

// Initialize
pdfMake.vfs = pdfFonts.pdfMake.vfs;
const { window } = new JSDOM('');

// Convert HTML to PDFMake format
const html = `
  <div>
    <h1>Sample Document</h1>
    <p>This is a <strong>simple</strong> example with <em>formatted</em> text.</p>
  </div>
`;

const converted = htmlToPdfmake(html, { window });
const docDefinition = { content: converted };

// Generate PDF
pdfMake.createPdf(docDefinition).getBuffer((buffer) => {
  require('fs').writeFileSync('output.pdf', buffer);
});

Supported HTML Elements

Block Elements

<div>, <p>, <h1> to <h6>
<table>, <thead>, <tbody>, <tfoot>, <tr>, <th>, <td>
<ul>, <ol>, <li>
<pre>

Inline Elements

<span>, <strong>, <b>, <em>, <i>, <s>
<a> (with support for external and internal links)
<sub>, <sup>
<img>, <svg>
<br>, <hr>

CSS Properties Support

The library handles these CSS properties:

Property	Support Details
`background-color`	Good support
`border`	Including individual borders
`color`	Good support, including opacity
`font-family`	Basic support
`font-style`	Support for `italic`
`font-weight`	Support for `bold`
`height`	For tables and images
`width`	For tables and images
`margin`	Including individual margins
`text-align`	Good support
`text-decoration`	Support for `underline`, `line-through`
`text-indent`	Basic support
`white-space`	Support for `nowrap`, `pre`, `break-spaces`
`line-height`	Basic support
`list-style-type`	Good support

Configuration Options

The htmlToPdfmake function accepts an options object as its second parameter:

const options = {
  defaultStyles: {
    // Override default element styles that are defined below
    b: {bold:true},
    strong: {bold:true},
    u: {decoration:'underline'},
    del: {decoration:'lineThrough'},
    s: {decoration: 'lineThrough'},
    em: {italics:true},
    i: {italics:true},
    h1: {fontSize:24, bold:true, marginBottom:5},
    h2: {fontSize:22, bold:true, marginBottom:5},
    h3: {fontSize:20, bold:true, marginBottom:5},
    h4: {fontSize:18, bold:true, marginBottom:5},
    h5: {fontSize:16, bold:true, marginBottom:5},
    h6: {fontSize:14, bold:true, marginBottom:5},
    a: {color:'blue', decoration:'underline'},
    strike: {decoration: 'lineThrough'},
    p: {margin:[0, 5, 0, 10]},
    ul: {marginBottom:5,marginLeft:5},
    table: {marginBottom:5},
    th: {bold:true, fillColor:'#EEEEEE'}
  },
  tableAutoSize: false,  // Enable automatic table sizing
  imagesByReference: false,  // Handle images by reference
  removeExtraBlanks: false,  // Remove extra whitespace
  removeTagClasses: false,  // Keep HTML tag classes
  window: window,  // Required for Node.js usage
  ignoreStyles: [],  // Style properties to ignore
  fontSizes: [10, 14, 16, 18, 20, 24, 28], // Font sizes for legacy <font> tag
  customTag: function(params) { /* Custom tag handler */ }
};

const converted = htmlToPdfmake(html, options);

Options Explained

defaultStyles

Object to override the default element styling. Useful for consistent document appearance:

const options = {
  defaultStyles: {
    h1: { fontSize: 24, bold: true, marginBottom: 10 },
    p: { margin: [0, 5, 0, 10] },
    a: { color: 'purple', decoration: null }
  }
};

tableAutoSize

Boolean that enables automatic table sizing based on content and CSS properties

Example:

const result = htmlToPdfmake(`<table>
  <tr style="height:100px">
    <td style="width:250px">height:100px / width:250px</td>
    <td>height:100px / width:'auto'</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td style="width:100px">Here it will use 250px for the width because we have to use the largest col's width</td>
    <td style="height:200px">height:200px / width:'auto'</td>
  </tr>
</table>`, { tableAutoSize:true });

imagesByReference

For Web browser only, not for Node

Boolean that enables the images handling by reference instead of embedding. It will automatically load your images in your PDF using the {images} option of PDFMake.

Using this option will change the output that will return an object with {content, images}.

const html = `<img src="https://picsum.photos/seed/picsum/200">`;
const result = htmlToPdfmake(html, { imagesByReference:true });
// 'result' contains:
//  {
//    "content":[
//      [
//        {
//          "nodeName":"IMG",
//          "image":"img_ref_0",
//          "style":["html-img"]
//        }
//      ]
//    ],
//    "images":{
//      "img_ref_0":"https://picsum.photos/seed/picsum/200"
//    }
//  }

pdfMake.createPdf(result).download();

customTag

Function to handle custom HTML tags or modify existing tag behavior:

const options = {
  customTag: function({ element, ret, parents }) {
    if (element.nodeName === 'CUSTOM-TAG') {
      // Handle custom tag
      ret.text = 'Custom content';
      ret.style = ['custom-style'];
    }
    return ret;
  }
};

Example with a QR code generator:

const html = htmlToPdfMake(`<code typecode="QR" style="foreground:black;background:yellow;fit:300px">texto in code</code>`, {
  customTag:function(params) {
    let ret = params.ret;
    let element = params.element;
    let parents = params.parents;
    switch(ret.nodeName) {
      case "CODE": {
        ret = this.applyStyle({ret:ret, parents:parents.concat([element])});
        ret.qr = ret.text[0].text;
        switch(element.getAttribute("typecode")){
          case 'QR':
            delete ret.text;
            ret.nodeName='QR';
            if(!ret.style || !Array.isArray(ret.style)){
              ret.style = [];
            }
            ret.style.push('html-qr');
            break;
        }
        break;
      }
    }
    return ret;
  }
});

removeExtraBlanks

Boolean that will remove extra unwanted blank spaces from the PDF.

In some cases these blank spaces could appear. Using this option could be quite resource consuming.

showHidden

Boolean to display the hidden elements (display:none) in the PDF.

removeTagClasses

Boolean that permits to remove the html-TAG classes added for each node.

ignoreStyles

Array of string to define a list of style properties that should not be parsed.

For example, to ignore font-family:

htmlToPdfmake("[the html code here]", { ignoreStyles:['font-family'] })

fontSizes

Array of 7 integers to overwrite the default sizes for the old HTML4 tag <font>.

replaceText

Function with two parameters (text and nodes) to modify the text of all the nodes in your HTML document.

Example:

const result = htmlToPdfmake(`<p style='text-align: justify;'>Lorem Ipsum is simply d-ummy text of th-e printing and typese-tting industry. Lorem Ipsum has b-een the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s</p>`, {
  replaceText:function(text, nodes) {
    // 'nodes' contains all the parent nodes for the text
    return text.replace(/-/g, "\\u2011"); // it will replace any occurrence of '-' with '\\u2011' in "Lorem Ipsum is simply d-ummy text […] dummy text ever since the 1500s"
  }
});

Advanced Features

Custom Styling with data-pdfmake

Apply PDFMake-specific properties using the data-pdfmake attribute:

<!-- Custom table properties -->
<table data-pdfmake='{"widths": [100, "*", "auto"], "heights": 40}'>
  <tr>
    <td>Fixed Width</td>
    <td>Fill Space</td>
    <td>Auto Width</td>
  </tr>
</table>

<!-- Custom HR styling -->
<hr data-pdfmake='{"color": "red", "thickness": 2}'>

Page Breaks

Control page breaks using CSS classes and PDFMake's pageBreakBefore:

const html = `
  <div>
    <h1>First Page</h1>
    <h1 class="page-break">Second Page</h1>
  </div>
`;

const docDefinition = {
  content: htmlToPdfmake(html),
  pageBreakBefore: function(node) {
    return node.style && node.style.includes('page-break');
  }
};

Image Handling

Support for various image formats and references:

<!-- Best option: Base64 encoded image -->
<!-- Required for Node environment -->
<img src="data:image/jpeg;base64,/9j/4AAQ...">

<!-- Image by URL (with imagesByReference option) -->
<!-- Only works with Web Browser -->
<img src="https://example.com/image.jpg">

<!-- Image with custom headers -->
<img data-src='{"url": "https://example.com/image.jpg", "headers": {"Authorization": "Bearer token"}}'>

For Base64 encoded image, please refer to the PDFMake documentation) and here. And you can check this Stackoverflow question to know the different ways to get a base64 encoded content from an image.

Common Use Cases

Tables with Complex Layouts

<table>
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th colspan="2">Header</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td rowspan="2">Cell 1</td>
      <td>Cell 2</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Cell 3</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

Styled Lists

<ul style="margin-left: 20px">
  <li>First item</li>
  <li style="color: red">Second item</li>
  <li>
    Nested list:
    <ol style="list-style-type: lower-alpha">
      <li>Sub-item a</li>
      <li>Sub-item b</li>
    </ol>
  </li>
</ul>

Links and Anchors

<!-- External link -->
<a href="https://example.com">Visit Website</a>

<!-- Internal link -->
<a href="#section1">Jump to Section</a>
<h2 id="section1">Section 1</h2>

Examples

You can find more examples in example.js which will create example.pdf:

npm install
node example.js

Donate

You can support my work by making a donation, or by visiting my Github Sponsors page. Thank you!