afpp/README.md

another f*cking pdf parser

# afpp

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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

```bash
npm install afpp
```

### Yarn

```bash
yarn add afpp
```

### pnpm

```bash
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

```ts
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

```ts
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

```ts
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);
})();
```