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Get a fillable PDF of just the form — no nav, no footer in Node.js with built-in fetch

A fillable PDF of a whole web page still carries the web page around it: the navigation bar, the cookie banner, the footer with forty links. Adding "pdf_form_only": true to a pdf_forms render prunes the document down to just the form — fields with their labels, the group headings, and the title directly above it. What comes out looks like the paper version of the form, not a printout of the website.

Below is a complete, runnable Node.js program using built-in fetch, no third-party dependency needed. It reads your API key from the SNAPDOK_KEY environment variable — free keys take about thirty seconds and need no card.

import { writeFile } from "node:fs/promises";

const res = await fetch("https://snapdok.io/v1/render", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: {
    "Authorization": `Bearer ${process.env.SNAPDOK_KEY}`,
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    url: "https://your-app.com/intake-form",
    format: "pdf",
    pdf_forms: true,
    pdf_form_only: true,
  }),
});

if (!res.ok) throw new Error(`${res.status} ${await res.text()}`);
await writeFile("form-only.pdf", Buffer.from(await res.arrayBuffer()));
console.log(res.headers.get("x-form-extracted"), "// true = pruned to the form; false = full page");

This flag is best-effort by design, and you should code for that. When the extractor cannot identify a form region it is sure about — no visible controls, a lone search box, a form wrapping the entire page (common on older ASP.NET sites), iframes, JavaScript widget "forms" — it falls back to the full page: the exact bytes pdf_forms alone would have produced, never a half-broken cut. The rule it is built around: better a navigation bar too many than a required field too few.

The response tells you which way it went: X-Form-Extracted: true means the PDF is the pruned form, false means the full page, with the machine reason in X-Form-Extract-Fallback. The flag is ignored unless format is "pdf" and pdf_forms is true, and it is metered as one ordinary render — no extra charge.

Notes for built-in fetch

No dependency needed: fetch is global from Node 18 onward (snapdok's own test suite uses it). The binary-safety detail is res.arrayBuffer() → Buffer.from(...) — reaching for res.text() is the classic way to corrupt a PDF in Node. fetch does not reject on HTTP error statuses, so the res.ok check is load-bearing: without it, an expired key writes a 40-byte JSON error to disk with a .pdf extension.

Response headers worth reading

Header	Meaning
`X-Form-Extracted`	true when the prune happened, false on fallback.
`X-Form-Extract-Fallback`	Why extraction fell back, when it did.
`X-Form-Fields`	Fields placed either way.

Get a fillable PDF of just the form — no nav, no footer in Node.js with built-in fetch

Notes for built-in fetch

Response headers worth reading

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