Idiomatic Rust bindings for Pdfium

pdfium-render provides an idiomatic high-level Rust interface around the low-level bindings to Pdfium provided by the excellent pdfium-sys crate.

    use pdfium_render::prelude::*;

    fn export_pdf_to_jpegs(path: &str, password: Option<&str>) -> Result<(), PdfiumError> {
        // Renders each page in the given test PDF file to a separate JPEG file.
    
        // Bind to a Pdfium library provided by the operating system.
        // (We could alternatively use a Pdfium library at a known location.)
        
        let pdfium = Pdfium::new(Pdfium::bind_to_system_library()?);
        
        // Open the PDF document...
  
        let document = pdfium.load_pdf_from_file(path, password)?;
        
        // ... set rendering options that will apply to all pages...
     
        let bitmap_render_config = PdfBitmapConfig::new()
            .set_target_width(2000)
            .set_maximum_height(2000)
            .rotate_if_landscape(PdfBitmapRotation::Degrees90, true);
    
        // ... then render each page to a bitmap image, saving each image to a JPEG file.
     
        document.pages().iter().for_each(|page| {
            page.get_bitmap_with_config(&bitmap_render_config)?
                .as_image() // Renders this page to an Image::DynamicImage
                .as_rgba8()?
                .save_with_format(
                  format!("test-page-{}.jpg", page.index()),
                  image::ImageFormat::Jpeg
                )?;
        });
    }

In addition to providing a more natural interface to Pdfium, pdfium-render differs from pdfium-sys in several other important ways:

pdfium-render uses libloading to late bind to a Pdfium library at run-time, allowing for run-time selection of system-provided or bundled Pdfium libraries and providing idiomatic Rust error handling in situations where a Pdfium library is not available. This differs from pdfium-sys which early binds to a Pdfium library at compile-time; the application will crash if the library cannot be found at run-time.
Late binding to Pdfium means that pdfium-render can be compiled to WASM for running in a browser; this is not possible with pdfium-sys.
Pdfium itself is architected as a set of separate modules, each covering a different aspect of PDF creation, rendering, and editing. pdfium-sys only provides bindings for the subset of functions exposed by Pdfium's view module; pdfium-render aims to ultimately provide bindings to all non-interactive functions exposed by all Pdfium modules, including document creation and editing functions. This is a work in progress.
Pages rendered by Pdfium can be exported as instances of Image::DynamicImage for easy, idiomatic post-processing.

Examples demonstrating page rendering, text extraction, page object introspection, creation of new documents, document concatenation, multi-page tiled output, and compiling to WASM are available at https://github.com/ajrcarey/pdfium-render/tree/master/examples.

What's new

Version 0.7.0 is a substantial release that introduces the first set of document editing functions into pdfium-render. This release includes the following improvements to the high-level interface:

Adds loading and saving of PDF documents from standard Rust readers and writers.
Adds creation of new documents.
Adds adding and deleting of pages to documents, and importing of pages from one document into another.
Adds adding and deleting of page objects to pages, and importing of page objects from one page into another.
Adds additional properties and functions to all page objects, including setting and reading of colors, strokes, fills, and blend modes, and object positioning, rotation, scaling, and skewing.
Adds the PdfPermissions collection, allowing reading of security handlers and permissions for a document.
Adds support for loading and saving of PDF documents to WASM - no longer is it necessary to embed documents directly into the compiled WASM module.

With this release, it is now possible to create a new PDF document from scratch, add pages to it (either by creating them from scratch, or by importing them from other documents), add new text objects to those pages, and output the newly created document to a file.

The initial editing focus has been on providing creation and editing support for text objects. Later 0.7.x releases will add similar support for creating and editing images, paths, and the other types of page objects supported by Pdfium.

Porting existing Pdfium code from other languages

The high-level idiomatic Rust interface provided by pdfium-render is entirely optional; the idiomatic interface is built on top of raw FFI bindings defined in the PdfiumLibraryBindings trait, and it is completely feasible to simply use these raw FFI bindings directly if you prefer. This makes porting existing code that calls FPDF_* functions trivial, while still gaining the benefits of late binding and WASM compatibility. For instance, the following code snippet (taken from a C++ sample):

    string test_doc = "test.pdf";

    FPDF_InitLibrary();
    FPDF_DOCUMENT doc = FPDF_LoadDocument(test_doc, NULL);
    // ... do something with doc
    FPDF_CloseDocument(doc);
    FPDF_DestroyLibrary();

would translate to the following Rust code:

    let bindings = Pdfium::bind_to_system_library().unwrap();
    
    let test_doc = "test.pdf";

    bindings.FPDF_InitLibrary();
    let doc = bindings.FPDF_LoadDocument(test_doc, None);
    // ... do something with doc
    bindings.FPDF_CloseDocument(doc);
    bindings.FPDF_DestroyLibrary();

Pdfium's API uses three different string types: classic C-style null-terminated char arrays, UTF-8 byte arrays, and a UTF-16LE byte array type named FPDF_WIDESTRING. For functions that take a C-style string or a UTF-8 byte array, pdfium-render's binding will take the standard Rust &str type. For functions that take an FPDF_WIDESTRING, pdfium-render exposes two functions: the vanilla FPDF_*() function that takes an FPDF_WIDESTRING, and an additional FPDF_*_str() helper function that takes a standard Rust &str and converts it internally to an FPDF_WIDESTRING before calling Pdfium. Examples of functions with additional _str() helpers include FPDFBookmark_Find(), FPDFAnnot_SetStringValue(), and FPDFText_SetText().

The PdfiumLibraryBindings::get_pdfium_utf16le_bytes_from_str() and PdfiumLibraryBindings::get_string_from_pdfium_utf16le_bytes() utility functions are provided for converting to and from FPDF_WIDESTRING in your own code.

Binding to Pdfium

pdfium-render does not include Pdfium itself. You have several options:

Bind to a dynamically-built Pdfium library provided by the operating system.
Bind to a dynamically-built Pdfium library packaged alongside your Rust executable.
Bind to a statically-built Pdfium library linked to your executable at compile time.

When compiling to WASM, packaging an external build of Pdfium as a separate WASM module is essential.

Dynamic linking

Binding to a dynamically-built Pdfium library is the simplest option. On Android, a system-provided libpdfium.so is packaged as part of the operating system; alternatively, you can package a pre-built dynamic library appropriate for your operating system alongside your Rust executable.

Native builds of Pdfium for all major platforms: https://github.com/bblanchon/pdfium-binaries/releases
WASM builds of Pdfium: https://github.com/paulocoutinhox/pdfium-lib/releases

At the time of writing, the WASM builds at https://github.com/bblanchon/pdfium-binaries/releases are compiled with a non-growable WASM heap memory allocator. This means that attempting to open a PDF document longer than just a few pages will result in an unrecoverable out of memory error. The WASM builds at https://github.com/paulocoutinhox/pdfium-lib/releases are recommended as they do not have this problem.

Static linking

If you prefer link Pdfium directly into your executable at compile time, use the optional static crate feature. This enables the Pdfium::bind_to_statically_linked_library() function which binds directly to the Pdfium functions included in your executable:

    use pdfium_render::prelude::*;

    let pdfium = Pdfium::new(Pdfium::bind_to_statically_linked_library().unwrap());

As a convenience, pdfium-render can instruct cargo to link a statically-built Pdfium library for you. Set the path to the directory containing your pre-built library using the PDFIUM_STATIC_LIB_PATH environment variable when you run cargo build, like so:

    PDFIUM_STATIC_LIB_PATH="/path/containing/your/static/pdfium/library" cargo build

pdfium-render will pass the following flags to cargo:

    cargo:rustc-link-lib=static=pdfium
    cargo:rustc-link-search=native=$PDFIUM_STATIC_LIB_PATH

This saves you writing a custom build.rs yourself. If you have your own build pipeline that links Pdfium statically into your executable, simply leave the PDFIUM_STATIC_LIB_PATH environment variable unset.

Note that the path you set in PDFIUM_STATIC_LIB_PATH should not include the filename of the library itself; it should just be the path of the containing directory. You must make sure your statically-built library is named in the appropriate way for your target platform (libpdfium.a on Linux and macOS, for example) in order for the Rust compiler to locate it.

pdfium-render will not build Pdfium for you; you must build Pdfium yourself, or source a pre-built static archive from elsewhere.

Compiling to WASM

See https://github.com/ajrcarey/pdfium-render/tree/master/examples for a full example that shows how to bundle a Rust application using pdfium-render alongside a pre-built Pdfium WASM module for inspection and rendering of PDF files in a web browser.

Some additional convenience functions are available when compiling to WASM:

The Pdfium::load_pdf_from_fetch() function uses the browser's built-in fetch() API to download a URL over the network and open it as a PDF document.
The Pdfium::load_pdf_from_blob() function opens a PDF document from the byte data in a Javascript Blob or File object, including File objects returned from an <input type="file"> element.
The PdfBitmap::as_image_data() function renders directly to a Javascript ImageData object, ready to display in an HTML <canvas> element.

Optional features

This crate provides the following optional features:

bindings: uses cbindgen to generate Rust bindings to the Pdfium functions defined in the include/*.h files each time cargo build is run. If cbindgen or any of its dependencies are not available then the build will fail.
static: enables binding to a statically-linked build of Pdfium. See the "Static linking" section above.

Neither feature is enabled by default.

Development status

The initial focus of this crate was been on rendering pages in a PDF file; consequently, FPDF_* functions related to page rendering were prioritised. By 1.0, the functionality of all FPDF_* functions exported by all Pdfium modules will be available, with the exception of certain functions specific to interactive scripting, user interaction, and printing.

Releases numbered 0.4.x added support for all page rendering Pdfium functions to pdfium-render.
Releases numbered 0.5.x-0.6.x added support for most read-only Pdfium functions to pdfium-render.
Releases numbered 0.7.x aim to progressively add support for all Pdfium page object creation and editing functions to pdfium-render.
Releases numbered 0.8.x aim to progressively add support for all other Pdfium editing functions to pdfium-render.
Releases numbered 0.9.x aim to fill any remaining gaps in the high-level interface prior to 1.0.0.

By version 0.8.0, pdfium-render should provide useful coverage for all but the most esoteric use cases.

There are 368 FPDF_* functions in the Pdfium API. As of version 0.7.0, 206 (56%) have bindings available in pdfium-render, with the functionality of roughly three-quarters of these available via the pdfium-render high-level interface.

If you need a binding to a Pdfium function that is not currently available, just raise an issue.

Version history

0.7.0: adds PdfPermissions collection, adds document loading and saving support, adds initial creation and editing support for documents, pages, and text objects, and improves WASM document file handling.
0.6.0: fixes some typos in documentation, updates upstream Pdfium WASM package source repository name.
0.5.9: corrects a bug in the statically linked bindings implementation. Adjusted tests to cover both dynamic and statically linked bindings implementations.
0.5.8: corrects a bug in the WASM implementation of certain FPDFAnnot_*() functions. Resolves a potential memory leak affecting the WASM implementation of various FPDF_*() functions.
0.5.7: adds support for binding to a statically-linked build of Pdfium, adds bindgen and static crate features.
0.5.6: adds pdfium_render::prelude, adds bindings for FPDFAnnot_*() and FPDFPage_*Annot*() functions, adds PdfPageAnnotations collection and PdfPageAnnotation struct to the high-level interface.
0.5.5: fixes two bugs in the WASM implementation, one to do with colors, one to do with text extraction. See https://github.com/ajrcarey/pdfium-render/issues/9 and https://github.com/ajrcarey/pdfium-render/issues/11 for more information.
0.5.4: changes default setting of PdfBitmapConfig::set_reverse_byte_order() to true to switch from Pdfium's default BGRA8 pixel format to RGBA8. This is necessary since the image crate dropped support for BGRA8 in version 0.24. See https://github.com/ajrcarey/pdfium-render/issues/9 for more information.
0.5.3: adds bindings for FPDFBookmark_*(), FPDFPageObj_*(), FPDFText_*(), and FPDFFont_*() functions, adds PdfPageObjects, PdfPageText, and PdfBookmarks collections to the high-level interface.
0.5.2: adds bindings for FPDF_GetPageBoundingBox(), FPDFDoc_GetPageMode(), FPDFPage_Get*Box(), and FPDFPage_Set*Box() functions, adds PdfPageBoundaries collection to the high-level interface.
0.5.1: adds bindings for FPDFPage_GetRotation() and FPDFPage_SetRotation() functions, adds PdfMetadata collection to the high-level interface.
0.5.0: adds rendering of annotations and form field elements, thanks to an excellent contribution from https://github.com/inzanez.
0.4.2: bug fixes in PdfBitmapConfig implementation.
0.4.1: improvements to documentation and READMEs.
0.4.0: initial release of minimal page rendering functionality.

pdfium-render 0.7.0