Dynamic PDF Template Creation in Javascript.

Whenever we have to create a Dynamic PDF, then it brings the same document structure and design concept i.e HTML and CSS into the picture.
So Developing that part needs to be done by a UI Developer or someone who is good with those technologies, but sometimes a UI Developer also faces a lot of problems creating complex pdf structure in template due to CSS compatibility issues with pdf renderers.

Javascript to PDF

Even I was also facing a lot of issues for the creation of a huge pdf document with some complicated structure so I started looking for some Javascript libraries like jsPDF, pdfKit, etc where only javascript code can help to build such PDFs. But working with these libraries was even more frustrating because to create each element or even for a text you need to call a function.

For Example:
pdfLib.createText(‘Hello World”);
….

This is actually not bad, but managing the complete code will be again a headache, and Line of Code will be a lot more than HTML & CSS. So I looked for more libraries and come with a great solution to all of this.

JSON to PDF

pdfMake — A javascript-based library where you can actually pass the JSON object to a function that creates the pdf file.
Isn’t this great? JSON. So you can actually pass this JSON through API and done.

Wait, What? using the JSON object the PDF will be created. then how to design the Structure of the template?

So these JSON object will actually hold the properties for the element that you like to create

example of list creation in a pdf template

You can look for the documentation of the pdfMake lib to quickly understand all of its features and functionalities.

Here is the final output of my work (text is been blur to avoid confidential issue).

Screenshot of the final output of PDF Template.

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