node-poppler

Asynchronous Node.js wrapper for the Poppler PDF rendering utilities

Overview

Poppler is a PDF rendering library that also includes a collection of utilities, which provide functionality for manipulating PDF documents and extracting data from them, including converting PDF files to HTML, TXT, or PostScript.

The node-poppler module provides an asynchronous Node.js wrapper around these utilities for easier use.

Installation

Install using npm:

npm i node-poppler

Linux and macOS/Darwin support

64-bit Windows binaries are provided via an optional dependency on the node-poppler-win32 package. For Linux and macOS users, the poppler-data package and poppler-utils binaries will need to be installed separately.

An example of downloading the binaries on a Debian system:

sudo apt-get install poppler-data poppler-utils

For macOS users, the binaries can be installed with Homebrew:

brew install poppler

Example usage

Please refer to the JSDoc comments in the source code or the generated type definitions for information on the available options.

poppler.pdfToCairo

Example of an async/await call to poppler.pdfToCairo() to convert the first two pages of a PDF file to PNG using ESM syntax:

import { Poppler } from "node-poppler";

const file = "test_document.pdf";
const poppler = new Poppler();
const options = {
	firstPageToConvert: 1,
	lastPageToConvert: 2,
	pngFile: true,
};
const outputFile = "test_document";

const res = await poppler.pdfToCairo(file, outputFile, options);
console.log(res);

Example of an async/await call to poppler.pdfToCairo() to convert the first page of a PDF file to a new PDF file via stdout using ESM syntax:

import { writeFile } from "node:fs/promises";
import { Poppler } from "node-poppler";

const file = "test_document.pdf";
const poppler = new Poppler();
const options = {
	lastPageToConvert: 1,
	pdfFile: true,
};

const res = await poppler.pdfToCairo(file, undefined, options);
// pdfToCairo writes to stdout using binary encoding if pdfFile or singleFile options are used
await writeFile("new_file.pdf", res, { encoding: "binary", flush: true });

poppler.pdfToHtml

Example of calling poppler.pdfToHtml() with a promise chain using CJS syntax:

"use strict";

const { Poppler } = require("node-poppler");

const file = "test_document.pdf";
const poppler = new Poppler();
const options = {
	firstPageToConvert: 1,
	lastPageToConvert: 2,
};

poppler
	.pdfToHtml(file, undefined, options)
	.then((res) => {
		console.log(res);
	})
	.catch((err) => {
		console.error(err);
		throw err;
	});

Example of calling poppler.pdfToHtml() with a promise chain using CJS syntax and a Buffer as input:

"use strict";

const { readFileSync } = require("node:fs");
const { Poppler } = require("node-poppler");

const file = readFileSync("test_document.pdf");
const poppler = new Poppler();
const options = {
	firstPageToConvert: 1,
	lastPageToConvert: 2,
};

poppler
	.pdfToHtml(file, "tester.html", options)
	.then((res) => {
		console.log(res);
	})
	.catch((err) => {
		console.error(err);
		throw err;
	});

poppler.pdfToText

Example of calling poppler.pdfToText() with a promise chain using CJS syntax:

"use strict";

const { Poppler } = require("node-poppler");

const file = "test_document.pdf";
const poppler = new Poppler();
const options = {
	firstPageToConvert: 1,
	lastPageToConvert: 2,
};
const outputFile = "test_document.txt";

poppler
	.pdfToText(file, outputFile, options)
	.then((res) => {
		console.log(res);
	})
	.catch((err) => {
		console.error(err);
		throw err;
	});

Contributing

Contributions are welcome, and any help is greatly appreciated!

See the contributing guide for details on how to get started. Please adhere to this project's Code of Conduct when contributing.

Acknowledgements

• Albert Astals Cid - Poppler developer

License

node-poppler is licensed under the MIT license.