PDF generator

Setting Up

Dependencies

• Docker
• Node ^20.12.2
• yarn
• AWS credentials

*Last updated 2024/04/22

Starting the server

• create a .env file based on the .env.example file. Ask a developer on the specific configuration
• run yarn install to install node_modules
• run docker build -t lambda-with-pandoc . to build
• run docker run --env-file .env -p 9000:8080 lambda-with-pandoc run the docker containers

Calling the server

Using curl

curl --location 'http://localhost:9000/2015-03-31/functions/function/invocations' --header 'Content-Type: application/json' --data '{ "userId":"c82da7d4-3295-4c4a-921b-7000d65224b6", "fileName": "my_set_pdf", "typeOfFile":"PDF", "markdown":"hi from local"}'

From postman

POST url:

http://localhost:9000/2015-03-31/functions/function/invocations

body:

[
    {
        "userId":"c82da7d4-3295-4c4a-921b-7000d65224b6",
        "fileName": "pokus_pdf",
        "typeOfFile":"PDF",
        "markdown":"hi from postman staging pdf"
    },
    {
        "userId":"c82da7d4-3295-4c4a-921b-7000d65224b6",
        "fileName": "pokus_tex",
        "typeOfFile":"TEX",
        "markdown":"hi from postman staging tex"
    }
]

Testing

Dependencies

In addition to the runtime dependencies above, running the full test suite locally requires:

• Pandoc — for integration tests that verify markdown → LaTeX conversion
• A TeX Live distribution with xelatex — for compile tests that produce real PDFs
• poppler-utils (pdftotext) — for content verification of compiled PDFs

On macOS these can be installed via Homebrew:

brew install pandoc mactex poppler
brew install --cask font-noto-sans font-noto-sans-cjk

Running tests

yarn test          # type-check + all tests
yarn test:unit     # unit and integration tests only
yarn test:types    # TypeScript type-check only

Test structure

File	Type	What it tests
src/utils.test.ts	Unit	fixInlineLatex, errorRefiner, deleteFile — pure function logic
index.test.ts	Unit	Zod schema validation and Lambda handler routing (Pandoc mocked)
src/pandoc.test.ts	Integration	Real Pandoc: markdown → LaTeX fragment output, math, implicit_figures, Unicode
src/compile.test.ts	End-to-end	Full pipeline: Pandoc + template.latex + xelatex → PDF; content verified with pdftotext

The compile tests take ~5–15 seconds each as they invoke xelatex.

More information

https://github.com/lambda-feedback/technical-documentation/blob/main/docs/pdf_generator/index.md