Get Started

Introduction

Learn what vue-pdf-export provides for Vue applications, including Canvas and selectable-text PDF rendering, output formats, SSR safety and styling.

vue-pdf-export is a Vue 3 HTML-to-PDF component and composable for browser applications. Use it from JavaScript or TypeScript.

These guides describe the published 1.3.0 API. If you maintain an installation through 1.1.1, use the v1 documentation. Read the full references for every published version here on the site.

The current API includes smart split controls, row-aware tables, header/footer objects and Vue slots, composition, expanded paper sizes, font readiness, chart snapshots, SVG fallback and opt-in image optimization. If your app uses direct header or footer props from an older release, see the migration guide.

It supports two rendering modes:

Canvas mode - maximum HTML/CSS visual fidelity through html2pdf.js + html2canvas + jsPDF.
Selectable text mode - browser-side vector PDF rendering with real selectable/searchable/copyable text, clickable PDF links, password protection, metadata, compression, page-aware headers/footers, and watermarks.

It also includes manual and automatic pagination, preview, download, native browser print, Blob/ArrayBuffer/Base64 output, export-only page/body styling, data-pdf-ignore, custom export CSS, external print stylesheets, forced light/dark themes, width auto-fit, safe filename normalization, progress stages, opt-in generation metrics, current-page progress, cancellation, page targeting, PDF permissions, SSR-safe imports, large-document optimizations, and advanced renderer configuration.

Default package behavior remains renderMode="canvas" for backwards compatibility. The live playground may choose a different default for demonstration purposes.

Highlights

Browser-side PDF generation with no package-managed upload service
Canvas and selectable-text rendering
Blob, ArrayBuffer, raw Base64, and PDF data-URL output
Native browser print support in both rendering modes
Incremental page-by-page Canvas rendering when page-break markers are present
Cooperative cancellation for long-running exports
Page-aware progress with currentPage / totalPages
Opt-in total, stage, and per-page generation timing metrics
data-pdf-ignore for screen-only UI that must stay out of generated PDFs
Export-only page/body styling without mutating the visible Vue DOM
Repeated-image caching in selectable-text rendering
Optional TTF/TrueType-outline OTF embedding for selectable text
Export-only chart snapshots, SVG fallback and explicit image quality controls
Text, image and trusted HTML watermark designs with per-export reuse
Temporary DOM/canvas cleanup between expensive rendering steps
Password protection, owner password, PDF permission flags, metadata, and compression
Headers, footers, logos, watermarks, page targeting, and clickable links
SSR-safe package imports with Nuxt 3 and Nuxt 4 validation
Packed-consumer verification across npm, pnpm, Yarn, Yarn Plug'n'Play, and Bun
Large-document stress presets from 5 through 1000 pages, plus custom counts

Presets are test inputs, not a guarantee that every page count will succeed on every device. Test representative documents in your target browsers.

Try it before integrating

The live playground exposes the package options, output APIs and diagnostics interactively.

Open playground

Compose Existing PDF Pages

Prepend or append whole existing PDF pages to vue-pdf-export output from a Blob, bytes or URL.

Installation

Install vue-pdf-export with npm and add the package styles in Vue, TypeScript, Vite and Nuxt applications, with package-manager compatibility guidance.