Pdfkit: Is this project still maintained?

[cgreening]

Need to know if we're safe to use this or should look at alternatives.

[gnoby]

We need to know that too but I guess if no one is answering we have our answer anyway...

[kocsis1david]

This is a nice pdf library, maybe someone could fork it and maintain it?

[v-python]

My experience with this project is that Devon shows up every month or two and responds to lots of issues in a whirlwind, so 3-4 days of non-response should not be taken as "proof that this project is not maintained".

[mrichtsfeld]

This is by far the best pdf library I have found so far, or are there any other recommendations?
@devongovett it would be great if you could merge the open pull requests. The community seems to be quite convinced and helpful regarding your awesome project. I think the npm download numbers say it all...

1,475 downloads in the last day
30,685 downloads in the last week
95,440 downloads in the last month

[devongovett]

Hey guys. Sorry for my slow responses, I'm really busy with other projects these days.

I'd like to open up PDFKit to more maintainers so I'm not the only one blocking everyone. I'd still like to be involved with the direction of the project, but maybe not the day-to-day operations as much.

@alafr since you submitted a lot of PRs, maybe you'd like to step up?

I'm open to others being involved as well, especially in issue triage etc. Please let me know if you're interested.

As for general project direction, I think we should get some of the existing stuff merged in, and then focus on porting the code to ES6 rather than CoffeeScript. There were various efforts underway at some point, but never finished.

[blikblum]

As for general project direction, I think we should get some of the existing stuff merged in, and then focus on porting the code to ES6 rather than CoffeeScript. There were various efforts underway at some point, but never finished.

@devongovett
I can take the duty of converting to ES6. But before start, i think two things are needed:

• Write tests to avoid regressions. I started at #806 and i'm confident to get a decent coverage by using code generated by pdfmake and other libraries examples

• Merge pendent PRs. There are a few PRs pending review, some of them seems to have good quality. Someone should pick the ones that are worth merging. With the tests this can be done easily

[devongovett]

awesome, thanks for working on this @blikblum

[devongovett]

I've also added @diegomura as a collaborator! He is the maintainer of react-pdf which uses PDFKit under the covers. 😄

[zoosky]

Nice.

[marcelh-gh]

@blikblum @diegomura @devongovett Hi! Have you started with the rewrite already? If not, what about doing it in TypeScript rather than plain ES6? Cheers, Marcel

[marcelh-gh]

@blikblum @diegomura @devongovett @alafr have you talked to the guys from pdfmake.org ? their work is inspired/based on pdfkit but uses a more declarative approach so the user does not have to care about absolute pdf coordinates. there seems to be quite a bit of recent activity. maybe a combination/collaboration of the two project makes sense(?) they are using ES6...

[tirish]

@marcelh-gh pdfmake is built on this package

@devongovett can you also give others the permissions to update the npm package? There was a critical fix introduced to handle text wrapping properly, but that fix has not been published to npm.

[marcelh-gh]

@tirish thanks for the info :) joining forces still might be a good idea....

[qqilihq]

@devongovett can you also give others the permissions to update the npm package? There was a critical fix introduced to handle text wrapping properly, but that fix has not been published to npm.

@devongovett @diegomura I'm currently blocked by the mentioned issue as well. Any chance to get this up on NPM?

[tirish]

Just want to bump this thread, since the repo has a new home/owner. @devongovett can you ensure the new maintainers get the npm version updated? As mentioned above, there was a critical fix that has not been published to npm.

[tirish]

@devongovett @diegomura bumping this again. The above mentioned critical fix being published to NPM and other important performance fixes need to be prioritized

[zoosky]

After a year waiting for things to move we should start reflecting about a fork.

[nrkn]

@zoosky there is currently significant work underway to add tests and convert to ES6 in order to get the project moving forward again:

https://github.com/foliojs/pdfkit/pull/859

[blikblum]

The ES6 conversion PR is ready.

You can help by testing the new ES build. More info at https://github.com/foliojs/pdfkit/pull/859#issuecomment-417500341