pdfio - PDF Read/Write Library
PDFio is a simple C library for reading and writing PDF files. The primary goals of PDFio are:
- Read and write any version of PDF file
- Provide access to pages, objects, and streams within a PDF file
- Support reading and writing of encrypted PDF files
- Extract or embed useful metadata (author, creator, page information, etc.)
- "Filter" PDF files, for example to extract a range of pages or to embed fonts that are missing from a PDF
- Provide access to objects used for each page
PDFio is not concerned with rendering or viewing a PDF file, although a PDF RIP or viewer could be written using it.
Requirements
PDFio requires the following to build the software:
- A C99 compiler such as Clang, GCC, or MS Visual C
- A POSIX-compliant
makeprogram - ZLIB (https://www.zlib.net) 1.1 or higher
IDE files for Xcode (macOS/iOS) and Visual Studio (Windows) are also provided.
Documentation
See the man page (pdfio.3) and full HTML documentation (pdfio.html) for
information on using PDFio.
Installing PDFio
PDFio uses a configure script on Unix systems to generate a makefile:
./configure
If you want a shared library, run:
./configure --enable-shared
The default installation location is "/usr/local". Pass the --prefix option
to make to install it to another location:
./configure --prefix=/some/other/directory
Once configured, run the following to make the library:
make all
To test it, run:
make test
To install it, run:
sudo make install
Visual Studio Project
The Visual Studio solution ("pdfio.sln") is provided for Windows developers and
generates the PDFIO1 DLL. You can also use NuGet to install the pdfio_native
package.
Xcode Project
There is also an Xcode project ("pdfio.xcodeproj") you can use on macOS which generates a static library that will be installed under "/usr/local" with:
sudo xcodebuild install
Legal Stuff
PDFio is Copyright © 2021-2025 by Michael R Sweet.
This software is licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0 with an (optional) exception to allow linking against GPL2/LGPL2 software. See the files "LICENSE" and "NOTICE" for more information.