TinyPDF
3kb pdf library (70x smaller than jsPDF)
Details
- External ID
- 46316968
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- TinyPDF
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Dec. 18, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 253
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9637404580152672
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
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
Enrichment
- Theme
- document and PDF utility tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- lightweight pdf library for javascript
- Manually corrected
- False
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 — 215 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #2 of 216 (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
- LocalPDF Tools · ph · 2026-09-16 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- SmallMB - Compress PDF & Image · ph · 2026-09-16 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Mdpdf a 2k line C CLI to convert Markdown to tiny PDFs · hn · 2026-04-09 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- PDF-Compress.ai · ph · 2026-09-17 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- AmiPDF · ph · 2026-09-23 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- pdftoimg · ph · 2026-09-16 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- PDF Batch Desk · ph · 2026-09-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.46
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.