TinyPDF
3kb pdf library (70x smaller than jsPDF)
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I needed to generate invoices in a Node.js app. jsPDF is 229KB. I only needed text, rectangles, lines, and JPEG images. So I wrote tinypdf: <400 lines of TypeScript, zero dependencies, 3.3KB minified+gzipped. What it does: - Text (Helvetica, colors, alignment) - Rectangles and lines - JPEG images - Multiple pages, custom sizes What it doesn't do: - Custom fonts, PNG/SVG, forms, encryption, HTML-to-PDF That's it. The 95% use case for invoices, receipts, reports, tickets, and labels. GitHub: https://github.com/Lulzx/tinypdf npm: npm install tinypdf
HN · launched Dec 18, 2025 · 253 upvotes (top 4%) · 0 views
Niche: software documentation and pdf generators · 55 launches, 4 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 55 launches in software documentation and pdf generators →
Could you build this?
Yes TinyPDF is a lightweight (<400 lines) pure TypeScript PDF generator that only implements raw PDF file specifications for basic text, lines, and images. LLMs have complete knowledge of the PDF spec syntax and can easily output small parser/writer utilities.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: jsPDF, html-to-image, Typst, pandoc, HTML + CSS for print
Concerns raised: Only supports ASCII characters, not full Unicode, No support for TTF fonts for non-English use cases, No bold, italics, or text formatting, 226KB bundle size too large for Cloudflare Workers, Lacks explicit list of unsupported features
Feature requests: Generate RTF files instead of PDF, Support Unicode and international characters, Support TTF fonts, Support text formatting (bold, italics), Support for images
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 572 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #3 of 573 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 1 day after the earliest competitor.
- TinyDOCX · hn · 2025-12-22 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- comprimirunpdf · ph · 2026-10-30 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- MillFile · ph · 2026-11-03 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- EasyPDF Exact Size Compressor · ph · 2026-11-14 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- LocalPDF Tools · ph · 2026-09-16 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Mdpdf a 2k line C CLI to convert Markdown to tiny PDFs · hn · 2026-04-09 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- SmallMB - Compress PDF & Image · ph · 2026-09-16 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- dom2pdf · ph · 2026-10-18 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.49
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