Question

Is there a way to trigger the PDF export feature in PhantomJS without specifying an output file with the .pdf extension? We’d like to use stdout to output the PDF.

Answer 1

As pointed out by Niko you can use renderBase64() to render the web page to an image buffer and return the result as a base64-encoded string.
But for now this will only work for PNG, JPEG and GIF.

To write something from a phantomjs script to stdout just use the filesystem API.

I use something like this for images :

var base64image = page.renderBase64('PNG');
var fs = require("fs");
fs.write("/dev/stdout", base64image, "w");

I don’t know if the PDF format for renderBase64() will be in a future version of phanthomjs but as a workaround something along these lines may work for you:

page.render(output);
var fs = require("fs");
var pdf = fs.read(output);
fs.write("/dev/stdout", pdf, "w");
fs.remove(output);

Where output is the path to the pdf file.