Pdfmake – PDF printing in pure JavaScript

In my case, I have a Javascript app that stores critical information for offline use, and users want to be able to print that information nicely. So I generate PDFs in Javascript. This could make that much easier.

what doesn't!

>What is the advantage over simply creating an appropriate LaTeX/ConTeXt document in the background and serving that?

the obvious advantage is that you wouldn't have to learn LaTeX/ConTeXt, no?

If you want to print a book or a perfectly aligned article do it in LaTeX

If you have a web-application however and it prints invoices or other documents pdfmake can be a good choice and an efficient solution

People don't want to wait 2-3 seconds these days to get a simple document on their printer. With pdfmake lots of standard documents will print in less than 300 ms and... it scales - as you do everything on the client side you don't have to care about server overhead, no matter how many concurrent users you have

jsPDF prints using:

    var doc = new jsPDF();
    doc.setFontSize(40);
    doc.text(35, 25, "Paranyan loves jsPDF");
    doc.addImage(imgData, 'JPEG', 15, 40, 180, 160);

   var dd = {
	content: [
		'First paragraph',
		'Another paragraph, this time a little bit longer to make sure, this line will be divided into at least two lines'
	]
   }

First you would need a pure js web browser, the closest thing currently being zombie I think. If you didn't care about running on the server then you could take advantage of the browser the lib is running in to get the current computed layout from the active dom and transform into the PDF layout, still a big job but the heavy lift is done by the browser. Telerik does this in their Kendo lib, where they render a active dom element to thier abstracted vector graphics model, then have PDF, SVG and Canvas renders for that: http://docs.telerik.com/kendo-ui/framework/drawing/drawing-d...