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Show HN: TinyPDF – 3kb pdf library (70x smaller than jsPDF) (github.com/lulzx)
95 points by lulzx 5 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 12 comments
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




It'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

browsable source: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Decker/blob/main/examples/dec...

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Back 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 :)

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Great 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.

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I have added it!

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Wow you’re not kidding. That was fast.

https://github.com/Lulzx/tinypdf/commit/961e6b602f19e125f210...

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So essentially - it only works with Latin script? Because without fonts, every other script is NOT going to render.

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3KB is wild. What features did you intentionally leave out to get this small?

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Not the author, but generating PDFs is much, much simpler than parsing PDFs

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It only supports Helvetica!

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Support for more than 7-bit ASCII characters. :)

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is it related to one of the other 10 products called TinyPDF?

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Yes, obviously: it's a tiny PDF library.

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