Idiomatic Rust bindings for Pdfium

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

    // Exports each page in a given test file to separate JPEG images
    // in the current working directory.

    Pdfium::new(Pdfium::bind_to_system_library().unwrap())
        .load_pdf_from_file("./test/test.pdf", None)
        .unwrap()
        .pages()
        .for_each(|page| {
            page
                .get_bitmap_with_config(&PdfBitmapConfig::new()
                    .set_target_width(2000)
                    .set_maximum_height(2000)
                    .rotate_if_landscape(PdfBitmapRotation::Degrees90, true))
                .unwrap()
                .as_image() // Renders this page to an Image::DynamicImage
                .as_bgra8()
                .unwrap()
                .save_with_format(format!("test-page-{}.jpg", page.index()), ImageFormat::Jpeg)
                .unwrap();
        });

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

• pdfium-render uses libloading to late-bind to a Pdfium library, whereas pdfium-sys binds to a library at compile time (and is a bit fiddly to configure). This makes pdfium-render considerably more flexible to work with, and enables dynamic switching between bundled libraries and system libraries, as well as idiomatic Rust error handling of situations where a Pdfium library is not available at runtime.
• Late-binding to Pdfium means that pdfium-render can be used to target Pdfium-compiled-to-WASM for running in a browser, which is not possible with pdfium-sys.
• Pages rendered by Pdfium can be exported as instances of Image::DynamicImage for easy, idiomatic post-processing.

Development status

The initial focus of this crate has been on rendering pages in a PDF file; consequently, FPDF_* functions related to bitmaps and rendering have been prioritised. By 1.0, the functionality of all FPDF_* functions exported by Pdfium will be available.

If you need a function that is not currently exposed, just raise an issue.

Compiling to WASM

See examples/README.md for a fully worked and commented example that shows how to bundle a Rust application using pdfium-render alongside a pre-built Pdfium WASM module for in-browser introspection and rendering of PDF files.

Porting existing Pdfium code from other languages

The high-level idiomatic Rust interface provided by the Pdfium struct is entirely optional; the Pdfium struct wraps around raw FFI bindings provided by the PdfiumLibraryBindings trait, and it is completely feasible to simply use those raw FFI bindings directly rather than the high level interface. This makes porting existing code that calls FPDF_* functions very straight-forward, while still gaining the benefits of runtime library binding and WASM compatibility provided by pdfium-render. For instance, the following C++ code snippet:

    string test_doc = "myTest.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()?;
    
    let test_doc = "myTest.pdf";

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

External Pdfium builds

pdfium-render does not bundle Pdfium at all. You can either bind to a system-provided library, or package an external build of Pdfium alongside your Rust application. For WASM, packaging an external build of Pdfium as a WASM module is essential.

• Native builds of Pdfium for all major platforms: https://github.com/bblanchon/pdfium-binaries/releases
• WASM builds of Pdfium, suitable for deploying alongside pdfium-render: https://github.com/paulo-coutinho/pdfium-lib/releases