pdfluent

PDFluent is a commercial Rust PDF SDK.

Free for evaluation. A valid license is required for production use.

A pure-Rust PDF SDK with XFA, PDF/A, digital signatures, redaction, text extraction, forms, and a WebAssembly target. Designed as a modern alternative to iText, Apryse/PDFTron, PDFBox, and Foxit — without the JVM, without C++ memory unsafety, without "Contact Sales" pricing.

Install

cargo add pdfluent

Minimal example

use pdfluent::prelude::*;

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

    let text = doc.extract_text(0)?;
    println!("First page: {text}");

    Ok(())
}

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

Status

Beta software — public API is stabilizing.

Public API surface is frozen for 1.0.0-beta.x but may receive small breaking changes before 1.0.0.
Not all features are fully complete; capability-gated via Cargo features.
XFA support is still under active development. xfa-flatten is feature-gated and not yet ready for general production use; see the changelog for current XFA fidelity status.
PDF/A, digital signatures, redaction, AcroForm fill/flatten, and text extraction have completed quality gates and are production-grade.

Capability features

Default: signing, pdfa, redaction.

Feature	Enables
`signing` (default)	PAdES B-LT / B-LTA digital signatures, CMS verification
`pdfa` (default)	PDF/A-1b/2b/3b validation and conversion
`redaction` (default)	Content redaction (search-based and region-based)
`ocr-tesseract`	OCR via Tesseract
`ocr-paddle`	OCR via PaddleOCR
`html-to-pdf`	HTML / URL → PDF conversion
`docx-export`	PDF → DOCX export
`xfa-flatten`	XFA form → static PDF flattening (experimental)
`wasm`	WebAssembly target
`tracing`	Observability via the `tracing` crate

Licensing

Free for evaluation, development, testing, and demonstration. The unlicensed SDK is fully functional; output carries an "unlicensed evaluation" marker (Producer string in PDF metadata + a one-time stderr warning).
Production use requires a valid PDFluent commercial license. Tiered pricing from Lite to Unlimited plus Enterprise; see pdfluent.com/pricing.
OEM redistribution (embedding the SDK in software you distribute to third parties) requires the OEM Redistribution add-on.

See the LICENSE file in this crate, or read the full commercial terms at https://pdfluent.com/terms.

A note on prior versions

1.0.0-beta.1 and 1.0.0-beta.2 were briefly published under MIT before the licensing model was finalized. Those versions have been yanked. Production use must be on 1.0.0-beta.3 or later under the PDFluent Commercial License. See the changelog for details.

Built and maintained by Innovation Trigger BV, operating as PDFluent.

pdfluent 1.0.0-beta.3