afpp

Another f*cking PDF parser. Because parsing PDFs in Node.js should be easy. Live long and parse PDFs. 🖖

Why?

There are plenty of PDF-related packages for Node.js. They work… until they don’t.

Afpp was built to solve the headaches I ran into while trying to parse PDFs in Node.js:

• 📦 Do I need a package with 30+ MB just to read a PDF?
• 🧵 Why is the event loop blocked?
• 🐏 Is that a memory leak I smell?
• 🐌 Should reading a PDF really be this performance-heavy?
• 🐞 Why is everything so buggy?
• 🎨 Why does it complain about the lack of a canvas in Node.js?
• 🧱 Why does canvas require native C++/Python dependencies to build?
• 🪟 Why does it complain about the missing window object?
• 🪄 Why do I need ImageMagick for this?!
• 👻 What the hell is Ghostscript, and why does it keep failing?
• ❌ Where’s the TypeScript support?
• 🧓 Why are the dependencies older than my dev career?
• 🔐 Why does everything work… until I try an encrypted PDF?
• 🕯️ Why does every OS need its own special setup ritual?

Prerequisites

• Node.js >= v22.14.0

📦 Installation

You can install afpp via npm, Yarn, or pnpm.

npm

npm install afpp

Yarn

yarn add afpp

pnpm

pnpm add afpp

Getting started

The afpp library makes it simple to extract text or images from PDF files in Node.js. Whether your PDF is stored locally, hosted online, or encrypted, afpp provides an easy-to-use API to handle it all. All functions have common parameters and accepts string path, buffer, or URL object.

Get text from path

import { readFile } from 'fs/promises';
import path from 'path';

import { pdf2string } from 'afpp';

(async function main() {
  const pathToFile = path.join('..', 'test', 'example.pdf');
  const input = await readFile(pathToFile);
  const data = await pdf2string(input);

  console.log('Extracted text:', data); // ['page 1 content', 'page 2 content', ...]
})();

Get image from URL

import { pdf2image } from 'afpp';

(async function main() {
  const url = new URL('https://pdfobject.com/pdf/sample.pdf');
  const arrayOfImages = await pdf2image(url);

  console.log(arrayOfImages); // [imageBuffer, imageBuffer, ...]
})();

Parse pdf buffer

import { parsePdf } from 'afpp';

(async function main() {
  // Download PDF from URL
  const response = await fetch('https://pdfobject.com/pdf/sample.pdf');
  const buffer = Buffer.from(await response.arrayBuffer());

  // Parse the PDF buffer
  const result = await parsePdf(buffer, {}, (content) => content);
  console.log('Parsed PDF:', result);
})();