Don’t install PDF dependencies, use this.

I will show you how to avoid useless dependencies in this silly example.

I remember that day when my PM came to the office and said to everyone that we needed to show a PDF file for viewing on our main page.

I as the lead frontend developer had to fulfill the PM’s wish.

I approached PM's office and asked, “What will the user do with this PDF file?”

He replied, “Just read, that’s it”.

Then, I looked up all the dependencies across npm and yarn packages that correspond to the functionality of displaying the PDF file.

Here is the list of what I found in the package manager search.

1. react-pdf (link)
2. pdfkit (link)
3. jspdf-autotable (link)
4. @react-pdf/renderer (link)
5. pdfjs-dist (link)

What I found interesting is all of them have a huge bundle size. What I mean is huge.

1. react-pdf has 3.23 MB
2. pdfkit has 5.9 MB
3. jspdf-autotable has 253 kB
4. @react-pdf/renderer has 2.33 MB
5. pdfjs-dist has 36.5 MB

I fully agree that jspdf-autotable has the smallest bundle size. However, I came up with a solution that was much more suitable.

The solution is easy as possible.