Getting Started with TypeScript

This tutorial downloads a known PDF, replaces Hello with Final on page 1, and writes the edited file to output.pdf. No account or API token is required. Anonymous output is watermarked.

1. Create a project

mkdir pdfdancer-typescript-demo
cd pdfdancer-typescript-demo
npm init -y
npm install --save-dev typescript tsx @types/node

2. Install PDFDancer

npm install [email protected]

Node.js 20 or newer is required.

curl -L https://docs.pdfdancer.com/files/v2/pdfdancer-v2-quickstart.pdf -o input.pdf

3. Create edit-pdf.ts

import * as fs from 'node:fs';
import {PDFDancer, TextReplaceRequest} from 'pdfdancer-client-typescript';

async function main(): Promise<void> {
  const input = new Uint8Array(fs.readFileSync('input.pdf'));
  const pdf = await PDFDancer.open(input);
  const response = await pdf.page(1).text().replace(
    TextReplaceRequest.literal('Hello', 'Final').build()
  );

  if (response.matched === 0) throw new Error('The source text was not found');
  if (response.errors?.length) throw new Error(`The edit failed: ${JSON.stringify(response.errors)}`);
  await pdf.save('output.pdf');
}

void main();

pdf.page(1).text() restricts the edit to page 1. Use pdf.text() to search the whole document.

4. Run it

npx tsx edit-pdf.ts

The program exits without output when the edit succeeds. Open output.pdf and confirm that Hello became Final. If the script reports that the text was not found, see When visible text does not match.

Next, learn about text targeting and responses or other content types.