TinyPDF | Not Hacker News!

Discussion (30 comments)

Showing 34 comments

IntelliAvatar

15 days ago

4 replies

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

wonger_

14 days ago

1 reply

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

IntelliAvatar

13 days ago

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.

hu3

13 days ago

utf-8

teaearlgraycold

14 days ago

It only supports Helvetica!

lysace

14 days ago

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

anilgulecha

14 days ago

1 reply

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.

lulzx

14 days ago

2 replies

I have added it!

nebezb

14 days ago

Wow you’re not kidding. That was fast.

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

pylotlight

14 days ago

HTML -> PDF was also a use case I've used previously FYI

croisillon

14 days ago

1 reply

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

esafak

14 days ago

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

wg0

14 days ago

1 reply

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

jbaiter

13 days ago

Agree, the lack of support for TTF fonts is a bummer for most non-english use cases:-/

RodgerTheGreat

14 days ago

2 replies

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...

kuschkufan

13 days ago

This decker stuff is pretty nifty too

user3939382

13 days ago

I’m working on one rn. It takes arbitrary PDFs and builds composable dynamic pandoc pipelines to match the source byte for byte output. It’s very very complex. But if I can get it finished it will fuck over Adobe so worth it.

culi

14 days ago

1 reply

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

normie3000

14 days ago

1 reply

It does sound very cool, but I don't think it exports to PDF: https://github.com/bubkoo/html-to-image/issues/327

culi

13 days ago

Oh my, you're right. I've actually only tried it for exporting to images. Sorry for the misleading comment!

copypaper

14 days ago

1 reply

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?

lulzx

13 days ago

1 reply

on cloudflare workers a 1MB bundle limit makes 226KB massive.

kentonv

13 days ago

FWIW, the limit these days is 10MB (after compression).

https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits/

That said, thank you for fighting library bloat! Small libraries tend to perform better (not just on Workers but in general).

dzrmb

13 days ago

I actually was battling jsPDF the other day so definitely need to give this a try, thanks!

raybb

14 days ago

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

winterec

14 days ago

Great work thanks for sharing. I've been looking for something like this for generating invoice PDFs without bloat.

layer8

14 days ago

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.

alexpadula

13 days ago

Well ain’t that a useful 400 lines of code eh! Good work

ErroneousBosh

13 days ago

Heh, no stars when I first looked and though "hey I'll star this" and now 300 ;-)

varrockbank

14 days ago

This seems like it would pare well with my 4kb text editor library (70x smaller than Ace.js): https://github.com/varrockbank/buffee

> HTML-to-PDF

Thoughts on a markup language / DSL people pass in as a string? It might reduce the distributable/source code size by reducing the number of API methods you currently expose.

> npm: npm install tinypdf

With the style of no-build and zero-dependencies, I'd think it be compelliing to omit package.json and tell people to just copy-paste the source or link to the distributable.

andai

14 days ago

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 :)

niutech

6d ago

Why not generate good old RTF files instead of PDF? They are much simpler!

userbinator

14 days ago

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.

nanis

13 days ago

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.

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