Loading Javascript from a URL in Node with Bent

In this guide, we'll show you how to load custom javascript as a URL when converting an HTML document to PDF using PDFShift's API. This allows you to add custom Js to your page to customize the output of your generated PDF.

It can be interesting to be able to set a custom javascript value to adjust the rendering of your page specifically when exporting the document to PDF. This allows you to keep a standard look and feel to your users, but adjust some areas when sending that same document to PDFShift to get back a PDF.

Moreover, adding a URL can be easier to do than passing the raw javascript content, as it allows you to later modify that javascript without having to modify the query made to PDFShift.

const bent = require('bent')
const fs = require('fs');

// You can get an API key at https://pdfshift.io
api_key = 'sk_xxxxxxxxxxxx'

params = {
    source: 'https://www.example.com',
    javascript: 'https://www.example.com/custom.js'
}

const post = bent('https://api.pdfshift.io/v3/convert/pdf', 'POST', 'json', 200);
const response = await post('', params, {Authorization: 'Basic ' + Buffer.from('api:' + apiKey).toString('base64')});

if (response.status >= 400) {
    throw new Error(`Request failed with status code ${response.status}: ${response.data}`);
}

const getBuffer = bent('buffer')
fs.writeFileSync('result.pdf', await getBuffer(response));

console.log('The PDF document was generated and saved to result.pdf');

The javascript parameter accepts either a string or a URL. It will be used as the javascript for the page when converting it to PDF. This allows you to set a custom javascript value to adjust the rendering of your page specifically when exporting the document to PDF.