pdfluent

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A pure-Rust PDF SDK: render, extract, edit, sign, redact, and validate PDF/A.

AGPL-3.0 or a commercial licence, at your option — see the Licence section below.

PDF/A validation and conversion, digital signatures, redaction, text extraction, AcroForm fill and flatten, page manipulation, encryption, and a WebAssembly target, with XFA behind a feature flag. The default build is pure Rust with no C or C++ dependency (claim A07): no JVM to run, no native library to ship, and a price list you can read without talking to sales.

Install

cargo add pdfluent

Minimal example

use pdfluent::prelude::*;

fn main() -> Result<()> {
    let doc = PdfDocument::open("input.pdf")?;
    println!("Pages: {}", doc.page_count());

    // All pages combined:
    let text = doc.extract_text()?;
    println!("{text}");

    // Per-page:
    for page in doc.pages() {
        println!("{}", page?.text()?);
    }

    Ok(())
}

For more, see https://pdfluent.com/docs.

Status

From 1.0.0 the public API follows semantic versioning: a breaking change means a new major version.

PDF/A validation and conversion, digital signatures, redaction, AcroForm fill and flatten, and text extraction are the supported surface, each behind the Cargo feature named below.
XFA is experimental. xfa-flatten is feature-gated and not part of what the release supports; see the changelog for its current state.
Rendering fidelity, PDF/A conversion and text extraction are measured on fixed corpora against readers that are not ours, and every published figure carries a claim ID at https://pdfluent.com/benchmarks/how-we-measure. This README repeats none of them.

Capability features

Default: signing, pdfa, redaction.

Feature	Enables
`signing` (default)	PAdES B-B / B-T / B-LT digital signatures, CMS verification. B-LTA is not implemented
`pdfa` (default)	PDF/A-1b/2b/3b validation and conversion
`redaction` (default)	Content redaction (search-based and region-based)
`ocr-tesseract`	reserved, no effect — see OCR below
`ocr-paddle`	reserved, no effect — see OCR below
`docx-export`	PDF → DOCX export
`xfa-flatten`	XFA form → static PDF flattening (experimental)
`wasm`	WebAssembly target
`tracing`	Observability via the `tracing` crate

OCR

Three routes, all supported, all through one seam. OCR lives in the separate pdf-ocr crate — the ocr-* flags on this crate are reserved names that currently enable nothing, so depend on pdf-ocr directly.

route	feature	needs
Your cloud provider	none	implement `OcrEngine` against Google Cloud Vision, AWS Textract, Azure Document Intelligence, or anything else
PaddleOCR	`paddle`	ONNX Runtime as a shared library; you supply the model weights, or pin their digests and let the crate fetch them
Tesseract	`tesseract`	Tesseract and Leptonica installed on the system

Whichever you pick, the PDF side is ours: make_searchable renders each page, hands the image to the recognizer, and writes the returned words and bounding boxes back as an invisible text layer over the scan. The output is a searchable, copyable PDF.

The facade stays free of all three so that a plain pdfluent dependency pulls in no system libraries and no model downloads. Opting in is your decision to make, not a side effect of using the SDK.

HTML to PDF

Not offered. Rendering modern HTML and CSS correctly means shipping a browser engine, and a rendering engine that is nearly right is worse than none — the output looks plausible and is wrong.

Use headless Chrome or Chromium for the conversion, then hand the PDF to PDFluent for everything after that: merging, page operations, compression, watermarks, encryption, signing, PDF/A conversion, redaction. That combination is well supported and is what we recommend.

Licence

AGPL-3.0 or a commercial licence, at your option. The AGPL is the default and the complete product: there is no licence key, no activation call and no tier, and every feature works in every build. If you cannot accept the copyleft obligation, the commercial licence is sold yearly and self-service at pdfluent.com/sdk/pricing, in four options: Commercial (per organisation), OEM Startup and OEM (per product), and Priority support (an add-on). The two texts are LICENSE and LICENSE-COMMERCIAL in this crate.

pdfluent 1.0.0