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Takes Literate CoffeeScript (Markdown) files and generates a PDF. Includes syntax highlighting for the examples, and even runs them to show the results inline. Good example of new rich text features. Eventually, the website will be generated from the same Markdown files.
79 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
79 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
# Getting Started with PDFKit
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### Installation
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Installation uses the [npm](http://npmjs.org/) package manager. Just type the
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following command after installing npm.
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npm install pdfkit
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### Creating a document
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Creating a PDFKit document is quite simple. Just require the `pdfkit` module
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in your CoffeeScript or JavaScript source file and create an instance of the
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`PDFDocument` class.
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PDFDocument = require 'pdfkit'
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doc = new PDFDocument
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### Adding pages
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The first page of a PDFKit document is added for you automatically when you
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create the document. Subsequent pages must be added by you. Luckily, it is
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quite simple!
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doc.addPage()
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You can also set some options for the page, such as it's size and orientation.
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The `layout` property can be either `portrait` (the default) or `landscape`.
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The `size` property can be either an array specifying `[width, height]` in PDF
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points (72 per inch), or a string specifying a predefined size. All of the
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standard paper sizes (and more) are predefined, so generally you can just use
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the standard name of the paper size you want and it will just work. However, a
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list of the predefined paper sizes can be seen [here](http://pdfkit.org/docs/paper_sizes.html). The
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default paper size is `letter`.
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Passing a page options object (as above) to the `PDFDocument` constructor will
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set the default paper size and layout for every page in the document, which is
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then overridden by individual options passed to the `addPage` method.
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You can also set the page `margins` option to either a number to make them all
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equal, or an object with `top`, `bottom`, `left` and `right` values.
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* * *
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### Setting document metadata
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PDF documents can have various metadata associated with them, such as the
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title, or author of the document. You can add that information by adding it to
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the `doc.info` object, or by passing an info object into the document at
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creation time.
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Here is a list of all of the properties you can add to the document metadata.
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According to the PDF spec, each property must have it's first letter
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capitalized.
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* `Title` - the title of the document
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* `Author` - the name of the author
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* `Subject` - the subject of the document
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* `Keywords` - keywords associated with the document
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* `CreationDate` - the date the document was created (added automatically by PDFKit)
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* `ModDate` - the date the document was last modified
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### Adding content
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Once you've created a `PDFDocument` instance, you can add content to the
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document. Check out the other sections to the left under "Documentation" to
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learn about each type of content you can add.
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### Saving the document
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When you are ready to write the PDF document to a file, just call the `write`
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method with a filename. If you want to send the document in response to an
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HTTP request, or just need a string representation of the document, just call
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the `output` method.
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That's the basics! Now let's move on to PDFKit's powerful vector graphics
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abilities.
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