Docs
Editor API
Export to PDF

Exporting blocks to PDF

It's possible to export BlockNote documents to PDF, completely client-side.

This feature is provided by the @blocknote/xl-pdf-exporter. xl- packages are fully open source, but released under a copyleft license. A commercial license for usage in closed source, proprietary products comes as part of the Business subscription.

First, install the @blocknote/xl-pdf-exporter and @react-pdf/renderer packages:

npm install @blocknote/xl-pdf-exporter @react-pdf/renderer

Then, create an instance of the PDFExporter class. This exposes the following methods:

import {
  PDFExporter,
  pdfDefaultSchemaMappings,
} from "@blocknote/xl-pdf-exporter";
import * as ReactPDF from "@react-pdf/renderer";
 
// Create the exporter
const exporter = new PDFExporter(editor.schema, pdfDefaultSchemaMappings);
 
// Convert the blocks to a react-pdf document
const pdfDocument = await exporter.toReactPDFDocument(editor.document);
 
// Use react-pdf to write to file:
await ReactPDF.render(pdfDocument, `filename.pdf`);

See the full example with live PDF preview below:

Customizing the PDF

toReactPDFDocument takes an optional options parameter, which allows you to customize the header and footer of the PDF:

Example usage:

import { Text } from "@react-pdf/renderer";
const pdfDocument = await exporter.toReactPDFDocument(editor.document, {
  header: <Text>Header</Text>,
  footer: <Text>Footer</Text>,
});

Custom mappings / custom schemas

The PDFExporter constructor takes a schema and mappings parameter. A mapping defines how to convert a BlockNote schema element (a Block, Inline Content, or Style) to a React-PDF element. If you're using a custom schema in your editor, or if you want to overwrite how default BlockNote elements are converted to PDF, you can pass your own mappings:

For example, use the following code in case your schema has an extraBlock type:

import { PDFExporter, pdfDefaultSchemaMappings } from "@blocknote/xl-pdf-exporter";
import { Text } from "@react-pdf/renderer";
 
new PDFExporter(schema, {
    blockMapping: {
        ...pdfDefaultSchemaMappings.blockMapping,
        myCustomBlock: (block, exporter) => {
            return <Text>My custom block</Text>;
        },
    },
    inlineContentMapping: pdfDefaultSchemaMappings.inlineContentMapping,
    styleMapping: pdfDefaultSchemaMappings.styleMapping,
});

Exporter options

The PDFExporter constructor takes an optional options parameter. While conversion happens on the client-side, the default setup uses two server based resources:

const defaultOptions = {
  // emoji source, this is passed to the react-pdf library (https://react-pdf.org/fonts#registeremojisource)
  // these are loaded from cloudflare + twemoji by default
  emojiSource: {
    format: "png",
    url: "https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/twemoji/14.0.2/72x72/",
  },
  // a function to resolve external resources in order to avoid CORS issues
  // by default, this calls a BlockNote hosted server-side proxy to resolve files
  resolveFileUrl: corsProxyResolveFileUrl,
  // the colors to use in the PDF for things like highlighting, background colors and font colors.
  colors: COLORS_DEFAULT, // defaults from @blocknote/core
};
Server-side processingExport to docx (Office Open XML)