pdf-gen

This is a Node.js library for generating PDFs for AFI FAS reports.

It runs an Express server on port 8080 that expects a url param. It uses Puppeteer to navigate to that URL and creates a PDF for each page. Finally, it uses PDFMerge to combine the single-page PDFs into one grand PDF and returns that to the browser.

Local development

1. Clone this repo.
2. Run npm i.
3. Run npm run dev.
4. In a browser, navigate to http://localhost:8080/?url={FAS URL}. You'll see console logs as each PDF gets created and the resulting PDF.

PDF creation process

Note that this library is very particular, designed for FAS reports only.

For it to work, the report page needs to have a first page with classes .page.current. If that page also has the .landscape class, the margins and orientation for the PDF page will change accordingly.

Once the first page is captured, Puppeteer will try to click on an element with class .next_page. On click, the report page will need to move the .page.current designation to the next page.

When there is no longer an element with class .next_page, we assume we are on the last page, capture it as a PDF, and close Puppeteer.

We then merge the individual PDFs, delete them from the server, and output the big PDF.