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Google Workspace Developers profile image Justin Poehnelt
Justin Poehnelt for Google Workspace Developers

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Exporting Individual Tabs from Google Docs as PDFs

#googledocs #pdf #googledrive

Google Docs tabs are great for organizing large documents, but there's no built-in way to export each tab as a separate PDF. Here's how to automate this using the Google Docs API and Google Drive API

Setup

You'll need a Google Cloud project with the Docs API and Drive API enabled, plus a service account with a JSON key. Share your Google Doc with the service account email. You could also use OAuth with user credentials.

The Code 

import { google } from "googleapis"; import fs from "fs"; import path from "path"; import { Readable } from "stream"; const FILE_ID = "YOUR_DOCUMENT_ID"; const OUT_DIR = "exports"; async function main() { const auth = new google.auth.GoogleAuth({ credentials: { client_email: process.env.GOOGLE_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_EMAIL, private_key: process.env.GOOGLE_PRIVATE_KEY .replace(/\\n/g, "\n"), }, scopes: [ "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.readonly", "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/documents.readonly", ], }); const docs = google.docs({ version: "v1", auth }); const { token } = await auth.getAccessToken(); const res = await docs.documents.get({ documentId: FILE_ID, includeTabsContent: true, }); for (const tab of res.data.tabs) { const { title, tabId } = tab.tabProperties; const name = `${title.replace(/ /g, "-")}.pdf`; const dest = path.join(OUT_DIR, name); const url = `https://docs.google.com/document/d/` + `${FILE_ID}/export?format=pdf&tab=${tabId}`; const response = await fetch(url, { headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${token}` }, }); if (!response.ok || !response.body) { throw new Error(`Failed to download "${name}"`); } await new Promise((resolve, reject) => { Readable.fromWeb(response.body) .pipe(fs.createWriteStream(dest)) .on("finish", resolve) .on("error", reject); }); console.log(`Downloaded ${name}`); } } main();
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How It Works

Two key pieces make this work:

  1. includeTabsContent: true - When calling docs.documents.get, this parameter populates the tabs array with metadata for each tab, including the tabId.

  2. Undocumented tab URL parameter - The export URL pattern https://docs.google.com/document/d/{FILE_ID}/export?format=pdf&tab={tabId} allows exporting individual tabs. The official files.export API doesn't support per-tab exports (issue tracker). Since this is undocumented, it could change.

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