svg-paper

The world's most maintainable way to create paper-printable documents 🖨💘

Workflows

You can print beautiful and maintainable paper documents by following steps.

Design the document with Adobe XD, Figma, or something
Export it as SVG
Embed SVG into your HTML and fix it with svg-paper on client side
That's it 💥

Installation

CDN

You can get the built assets from jsDelivr.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/svg-paper/dist/svg-paper.min.css">

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/svg-paper/dist/svg-paper.min.js"></script>

npm

Of course you also can install via npm.

$ npm install svg-paper

How to prepare SVG template

See this doc 📝

Basic usage

First, just embed SVG content in .paper element like following.

<body>
  <div class="paper">
    <svg>...</svg>
  </div>
</body>

Next, load svg-paper[.min].js with <script> tag or import/require svg-pager[.min].js as a module.

<script src="svg-paper.min.js"></script>
<script>
  const paper = new SvgPaper()
  // ...
</script>

import SvgPaper from 'svg-paper'
// or
// const SvgPaper = require('svg-paper')

const paper = new SvgPaper()

Then you can replace or adjust SVG contents in DOM easily with svg-paper like following.

paper
  // replace placeholder to actual value
  .replace('%placeholder1%', 'Actual value 1')
  // ... and more

  // set max width to 1000
  // in the other words, if actual width of the content is bigger than 1000 it shrinks automatically
  .adjustText('#selector1', 1000)

  // set max width to 800 and brings the element #selector2 to the center of 800 width area   
  .adjustText('#selector2', 800, 'middle')

  // of course you can bring it to the end
  .adjustText('#selector3', 800, 'end')

  // automatically wrap or shrink actual content so that it fits within the specified area (600 x 300)
  .adjustTetxarea('#selector4', 600, 300)

  // you can pass some additional args
  .adjustTextarea('#selector5',
    600,  // width 
    300,  // height
    1.2,  // lineHeight : default is 1.2 times font-size
    0.5,  // paddingX   : default is 0.5 times font-size
    0.5,  // paddingY   : default is 0.5 times font-size
    false // nowrap     : default is false. if true, content will not be wrapped
  )

  // finally, apply all replacing and adjusting to DOM
  .apply()

Beautify preview screen

To beautify preview screen, you should add only 3 lines to your HTML 👍

<head>
  ...
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="svg-paper.min.css"> <!-- here -->
  <style>@page { size: A4 }</style> <!-- here -->
</head>

<body>
  <div class="paper A4"> <!-- here -->
    <svg>...</svg>
  </div>
</body>

Just load svg-paper.min.css (or svg-paper.css), in <head> set @page size, and set the class of .paper element to specify page size.

Available page sizes are:

A3 A3 landscape
A4 A4 landscape
A5 A5 landscape
letter letter landscape
legal legal landscape

Passing variables from back-end to front-end

svg-paper depends on DOM, so in most cases you have to pass variables to be replaced with placeholders in template from back-end to front-end.

The most easy ways is just passing replacements and text/textarea adjustment parameters to front-end as JSON string.

PHP and Twig example

// Controller
public function paperAction($id)
{
    $model = $repository->findById($id);
    
    return $this->render('paper.html.twig', [
        'svg' => file_get_contents('/path/to/paper.svg'),
        'replacements' => [
            '%name%' => $model->name,
            // ... and more
        ],
    ]);
}

{# paper.html.twig #}
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="svg-paper.min.css">
  <style>@page { size: A4 }</style>
</head>

<body>
  <div class="paper A4">
    {{ svg|raw }}
  </div>
  <div data-replacements="{{ replacements|json_encode }}"></div>

  <script src="svg-paper.min.js"></script>
  <script src="your-script.js"></script>
</body>
</html>

// your-script.js
const paper = new SvgPaper()

const replacements = $('[data-replacements]').data('replacements')

for (let [search, replacement] of Object.entries(replacements)) {
  paper.replace(search, replacement)
}

paper.apply()

Tips

Hiding content before placeholders are replaced

svg-paper replaces placeholders and adjust text/textarea after DOM loaded, so the content before replaced and adjusted will be shown on the screen for a moment 🤔

This problem is very easy to solve just by adding some "blinder" layer on the content and disappear it after .apply() 👍

<body>
  <div id="blinder" style="width:100vw; height:100vh; background-color:#ccc"></div>
  <div class="paper">
    <svg>...</svg>
  </div>
</body>

paper.apply()

document.querySelector('#blinder').style.display = 'none'

PDF generation

You can easily print to PDF directly by using electron-pdf.

The basic usage of electron-pdf is following.

$ npm install --global electron-pdf
$ electron-pdf your-document.html your-document.pdf

But svg-paper modifies HTML content by JavaScript, so you have to wait it before printing by following.

$ electron-pdf your-document.html your-document.pdf -e # -e is the shorthand for --waitForJSEvent

<!-- your document -->
<body>
  ...
  <script>document.body.dispatchEvent(new Event('view-ready'))</script> <!-- 'view-ready' is the default event name for --waitForJSEvent -->
</body>

To learn more see README of electron-pdf.

Enjoy! ✨

ttskch/svg-paper