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Show HN: TinyPDF – 3kb pdf library (70x smaller than jsPDF) (github.com)

253 points by lulzx ↗ HN
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

24 comments

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IntelliAvatar
3KB is wild. What features did you intentionally leave out to get this small?
wonger_
Not the author, but generating PDFs is much, much simpler than parsing PDFs
IntelliAvatar
That 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
Support for more than 7-bit ASCII characters. :)
hu3
utf-8
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anilgulecha
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.

croisillon
is it related to one of the other 10 products called TinyPDF?
andai
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 :)

wg0
So essentially - it only works with Latin script? Because without fonts, every other script is NOT going to render.
culi
While 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

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

layer8
Only 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
Was 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

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winterec
Great work thanks for sharing. I've been looking for something like this for generating invoice PDFs without bloat.
copypaper
Nice 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?
userbinator
I 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
I actually was battling jsPDF the other day so definitely need to give this a try, thanks!
nanis
HTML + 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
Heh, no stars when I first looked and though "hey I'll star this" and now 300 ;-)
alexpadula
Well ain’t that a useful 400 lines of code eh! Good work
niutech
Why not generate good old RTF files instead of PDF? They are much simpler and support more than ASCII charset.