I’ve been singing the praises of the officeParser library for a while. It’s an open source JavaScript library that can parse, extract, and convert between PDFs and Office documents, as well as OpenOffice, ePub and more. My demos have all focused on client-side examples but obviously the library would work great in a server side workflow as well. I haven’t worked at Adobe for years now, but I still get strangely excited working with documents. I’ll just add that to the long list of reasons I’m a big nerd.

A few weeks ago, I reached out to Harsh Ankur about an idea inspired by Adobe’s Document Generation API. This was probably my favorite API in their suite of PDF services. You take a Word document, put in tokens, and call the API with your data. The API would swap out the tokens with real data and give you a PDF in return. (Or Word again if you wanted that.) I suggested this to Harsh and then – voila – he added it!

At this time, the token system is simply a replacement system. You add My name is in your Word document, and if you pass { "name":"Juniper Montage"} via the library’s APIs you’ll get My name is Juniper Montage on the way out.

This new support is a core API, OfficeTemplate, and supports both replacing values from a regular JavaScript object or returning an array of results from a JavaScript array of objects. (Which, by the way, is something I was trying to get Adobe to add to their APIs. One of their competitors, DocuGenerate, has had this for a while.)

Here’s how simple it is to use. First, create and save a Word document. Formatting doesn’t matter – make it as pretty or simple as you would like. Here’s an example with a few tokens:

Imagine this is stored as customerReport.docx. To turn this into a PDF, you would first import the relevant libraries (in the sample below I’m using an npm installed version, not CDN):

import { OfficeConverter, OfficeTemplate } from 'officeparser/browser-native-pdf' 

Then – grab the Word document as binary data:

const response = await fetch('/assets/customerReport.docx') const template = new Uint8Array(await response.arrayBuffer()) 

Get some sample data:

const data = {   customerName: 'Northwind & Co',   date: '2026-10-16',   productsTotal: 7,   reportYear: 2026,   profit: 2500,   losses: 125,   recommendation: 'Continue growing. Duh',   reporter: 'Juniper Montage', } 

Next, use the library to convert the template:

const docx = await OfficeTemplate.render(template, { data }) 

Finally, turn the rendered document into a PDF. The result’s value is the PDF’s binary data:

const { value: pdfBytes } = await OfficeConverter.convert(docx, 'pdf', {   generatorConfig: { pdfConfig: { engine: 'native' } }, }) 

At this point you can do whatever, like open it in a new tab:

const pdf = new Blob([pdfBytes], { type: 'application/pdf' }) window.open(URL.createObjectURL(pdf), '_blank') 

As a note, this requires an additional package, only in the browser, pdf-lib.

A Real Demo

To show this in action, I built a simple demo that lets you fill in a form, and get the result as a PDF.

This form is tied to a bit of JavaScript that grabs the values, makes use of Intl to format dates, numbers, and currencies, and then uses officeParser to create a dynamic PDF from your values. Here’s an example:

Try this yourself here: https://cfjedimaster.github.io/webdemos/officeparser/wordtemplate/dist/index.html

You can find the complete source for this here: https://github.com/cfjedimaster/webdemos/tree/master/officeparser/wordtemplate

As I mentioned above, currently the token system is relatively simple, but I’ve been talking with Harsh about some improvements that I bet will land pretty soon. Let me know what you think!

Raymond Camden