Puppeteer PDF Title and Author (metadata)

Question

After all my searches and code digging didn't help, I'm asking here for a hint:

How, using Puppeteer PDF generation, do I set the metadata of the file (specifically title and author)?

I've tried setting meta tags in my HTML, but it didn't output these into the file metadata.

Answer 1

Puppeteer does not come with built-in functionality to edit or write metadata to a PDF.

Instead, you can install the exiftool command line utility to edit the metadata of PDFs generated with Puppeteer:

sudo apt install libimage-exiftool-perl

Then you can use the Node.js child_process.exec() function to call the command line utility from your program after the PDF has been generated:

'use strict';

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');
const exec = require('util').promisify(require('child_process').exec);

const execute = async command => {
  const {stdout, stderr} = await exec(command);

  console.log((stderr || stdout).trim());
};

(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
  const page = await browser.newPage();

  await page.goto('https://example.com/');

  await page.pdf({
    path: 'example.pdf',
  });

  await execute('exiftool -title="Example PDF" -author="John Doe" /var/www/example.com/public_html/example.pdf');

  await browser.close();
})();

Answer 2

The accepted answer is right, as for now Puppeeter doesn't support setting pdf metadata. But I just wanted to give a solution using a node package instead of a native library : pdf-lib.

You need to :

• generate the pdf with puppeeter
• use the returned buffer to load a pdf'lib's PdfDocument
• set the metadata you want
• send (and/or save) the result document

      import puppeteer from 'puppeteer'
      import { PDFDocument } from 'pdf-lib'
      import fs from 'fs'

      // generate pdf page as usual with puppeeter
      const browser = await puppeteer.launch()
      const page = await browser.newPage()
      await page.setContent(`Some html`),
      const puppeeterPdf = await page.pdf()
      await browser.close()

      // Give the buffer to pdf-lib
      const pdfDoc = await PDFDocument.load(puppeeterPdf)
      pdfDoc.setTitle('A title')
      pdfDoc.setAuthor('An author')
      const pdfBytes = await pdfDoc.save()

      // write to disk
      await fs.promises.writeFile('path/to/file.pdf', pdfBytes)
      // send via http
      res.send(Buffer.from(pdfBytes))