38 tools
Java library and CLI toolset covering PDF creation from scratch (with embedded fonts and images), Unicode text extraction, splitting and merging, form field extraction and filling, PDF/A-1b validation via its Preflight module, rendering pages to PNG/JPEG, printing via the Java printing API, and digital signing. The de facto standard Java PDF library, used as the underlying engine behind numerous other tools in this directory (PDFsam, PDFLayoutTextStripper, PdfBox-Android, and more).
Print formatter driven by XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO): reads an FO tree (often produced via XSLT from semantic XML) and renders it to PDF (its primary target, targeting the PDF 1.4 spec), plus PostScript, PCL, AFP, PNG, RTF, TXT, and other outputs. Handles multi-page tables, footnotes, static page regions, and external graphics; usable standalone, embedded, via servlet, or via an Ant task.
PHPPHP package that drives headless Chrome (via Puppeteer, run through a small Node.js bridge script) to convert a URL, HTML string, or local HTML file into a PDF or image, getting genuine modern browser rendering rather than a PDF-specific rendering engine's approximation. Can also extract the rendered HTML body after JavaScript execution completes and list every network request the page triggered — useful for debugging what a page actually loaded before capture.
OCamlCommand-line PDF manipulation toolkit: split, merge, and extract pages while preserving bookmarks; encrypt/decrypt (AES 128/256); scale, rotate, crop, and flip pages; stamp text, watermarks, and page numbers; manage annotations, metadata, and file attachments; rasterize pages to images; and produce PDF/UA-tagged output.
Puppeteer-based (headless Chrome) command-line tool that exports HTML slide presentations to high-quality PDF, with native support for 13 frameworks (reveal.js, impress.js, remark, Bespoke.js, deck.js, etc.) plus a generic mode for others; can also capture slides as PNG/JPG images, export slide ranges, and set PDF metadata.
RubyCLI utility and Ruby library that extracts searchable UTF-8 plain text from documents, generates page images and thumbnails in any format, splits documents into single-page or full PDFs, and extracts metadata (title, author, page count). Built by DocumentCloud for processing large volumes of source documents in journalism/investigative-reporting workflows, wrapping several underlying tools (Poppler, ImageMagick, Tesseract) behind one consistent CLI.
JavaScriptCLI tool and Node.js API (built on Electron/Chromium) that converts URLs, HTML files, or Markdown files to PDF or PNG, with custom CSS injection, page size/orientation/margin control, print-background support, custom request headers, and batch/concurrent job handling.
RubyRails-oriented gem (headless Chrome via Ferrum, no Node.js dependency) that renders HTML/URLs to PDF (`render ferrum_pdf: {}`) with paper size/margin/orientation/scale options and dynamic headers/footers, or captures PNG/JPEG screenshots (`render ferrum_screenshot: {}`) of the full page, viewport, or a CSS-selected element.
JavaRenders well-formed XML/XHTML using CSS 2.1 layout/formatting to Swing panels, images, or PDF (via an OpenPDF-based renderer, or by delegating to a headless Chrome shell for modern HTML5/CSS3 support); also offers SWT output for Eclipse-based apps.
CPostScript and PDF interpreter/renderer from Artifex — the reference engine that many other PDF tools build on or shell out to under the hood. Converts PostScript and PDF to raster images, plain text, DOCX, PCL, and XPS; compresses PDFs while preserving visual quality; converts to and validates against the PDF/A archival standard; and adds a searchable OCR text layer to scanned pages. Also handles imposition (N-up page layout), ICC color management, and ZUGFeRD/Factur-X e-invoicing embedding.
Ruby gem (using ImageMagick and Ghostscript under the hood) that extracts a PDF page as an image — PNG or similar — or as page text, reports total page count, and iterates all pages in batch, with configurable image width/density/quality/colorspace/alpha and custom processor paths. Its text extraction is a thin wrapper around `pdftotext` rather than an independent implementation, so text-extraction fidelity matches whatever Poppler already produces.
Ruby gem that uses Puppeteer/headless Chromium (or Firefox) to convert URLs, inline HTML, local files, or Rails view templates into PDF, PNG, or JPEG: configurable page layout/margins/viewport, cookies/headers, CSS/JS injection, cover pages, HTTP basic auth, remote-browser connections, wait conditions (network idle, element visibility), and Rack middleware for URL-extension-triggered conversion.
C++Open-source graphical front-end for Ghostscript on Windows/Linux/macOS, giving Ghostscript's command-line PostScript/PDF interpreter a proper windowed UI: views and navigates PostScript and PDF files, and converts sequences of PDF pages to image files (from raw bitmap through TIFF-pack formats) at a selectable output resolution. Originally developed by Russell Lang alongside Ghostscript itself.
Node.js library that renders HTML (local strings or remote URLs) to PDF using headless Chrome/Chromium, or exports as PNG/JPEG/WebP screenshots; supports templated headers/footers, custom HTTP headers, configurable viewport/device-scale, and multiple render-completion triggers (callbacks, DOM events, timers).
PHPLaravel wrapper around the Snappy library: generates PDFs or images from HTML strings, files, or Laravel views, with output to file/browser/download, wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltoimage option passthrough (paper size, orientation, margins), and a fake mode for testing without real rendering.
CLightweight, fast C library, desktop viewer, and CLI toolset for PDF, XPS, and e-book formats, built by Artifex around the same rendering core used in Ghostscript. Renders pages and extracts text/images/metadata/structured content; creates, splits, merges, and compresses PDFs; adds annotations (highlights, stamps, shapes); permanently redacts content; and digitally signs documents. Converts between PDF, SVG, PNG, HTML, and PostScript, and embeds into web pages and native apps via its library bindings.
Pure-Java HTML/CSS-to-PDF and HTML-to-image renderer, positioned as a modernization of the original Flying Saucer project with updated dependencies and continued maintenance. Takes well-formed XHTML/XML styled with CSS 2.1 and lays it out using the same core rendering approach as Flying Saucer, producing PDF via an underlying PDF library rather than a browser engine. A lighter-weight alternative to browser-based HTML-to-PDF tools when the input HTML is already clean/well-formed rather than arbitrary web pages.
PhantomJS-based library that converts HTML to PDF, PNG, or JPEG via a file/stream/buffer API, with configurable paper size, orientation, margin, zoom, and header/footer options. No longer maintained since PhantomJS itself was deprecated years ago; its own README now directs users to migrate to a headless-Chrome/Puppeteer-based alternative instead, several of which appear elsewhere in this directory.
Renders a practical subset of XML/XHTML/HTML5 with CSS 2.1+ (incl. CSS3 transforms, gradients, multiple backgrounds) to PDF or images, with SVG and MathML plugin support, accessible/tagged PDF output (Section 508, PDF/UA, WCAG 2.0), PDF/A compliance, font fallback and embedding, RTL/bidi text, footnotes, and file embedding via link download attributes.
Compares the text layers of two PDFs and outputs the bounding boxes of changed text as JSON, identifying exactly which text regions differ between two versions of a document rather than just reporting that they differ. Then rasterizes the changed pages to a PNG with red outlines drawn around the differences, giving a visual diff alongside the structured JSON output. Useful for reviewing what actually changed between two revisions of a generated or edited PDF.
JavaScriptNode.js module that converts PDF files into image buffers (PNG) directly in memory, without writing any intermediate file to disk. Built on pdf.js for rendering, so it inherits pdf.js's own rendering fidelity rather than shelling out to a native binary like Ghostscript or poppler-utils. A convenient choice specifically when the calling code needs the resulting image bytes in-process rather than a file on disk.
JavaScriptCross-platform TypeScript/JavaScript module extracting text, embedded images, tables, and document metadata/outline from PDFs, plus rendering pages to PNG screenshots — a broader capability set than most JS PDF-parsing libraries, which typically stop at plain text. A complete rewrite under new maintainership (mehmet-kozan) since the original gitlab.com/autokent/pdf-parse went unmaintained, actively published through late 2025.
Converts PDFs to JPG, JPEG, PNG, or WebP images via ImageMagick and Ghostscript under the hood: render specific pages or all of them, control output quality/DPI/dimensions/background color, read page count and page dimensions, and handle password-protected PDFs. Requires ImageMagick 7 specifically (not the older ImageMagick 6 many systems still ship), since it relies on API changes introduced in that major version.
PythonWraps Poppler's `pdftoppm`/`pdftocairo` to convert PDFs (whole documents or page ranges) into PIL Image objects: PPM/JPEG/PNG output, multi-threaded batch conversion, grayscale mode, custom sizing, and password-protected PDF support.
Node.js utility for converting PDF pages to image formats, with output written directly to a file, returned as base64, or handed back as an in-memory buffer depending on what the caller needs. Built on GraphicsMagick/ImageMagick via Ghostscript for the actual PDF rasterization rather than a pure-JS rendering path, meaning both need to be installed as system dependencies alongside the Node package.
ScalaExtracts figures, tables, captions, figure names/numbers, section titles, and in-figure text from scholarly (computer science) PDFs, with page location and bounding boxes; renders extracted figures as raster (PNG/JPEG) or vector (SVG/PS/EPS, via pdftocairo) images; supports multi-threaded batch processing and includes debugging visualization tools.
R bindings for extracting content from PDFs: `pdf_text()` for per-page text, `pdf_info()` for metadata (author, creation date, tags), `pdf_toc()` for table of contents/section headers, `pdf_fonts()` for font info, embedded-attachment access, and `pdf_render_page()` to rasterize pages to bitmap (e.g. PNG/WEBP). Does not handle table extraction (recommends the `tabulizer`/`tabulapdf` package) or OCR of scanned text (recommends the `tesseract` package).
PHPConverts XML (or Markdown) documents to PDF or images (JPEG/PNG via GD/Imagick/Gmagick) with HTML-like tags (div, p, table, headings, lists, images, links); supports auto-breakable/fixed pages, multi-column layouts, headers/footers/watermarks, page numbering, metadata, internal/external links, bookmarks, sticky notes, barcodes (via Zend), simple pie charts, borders, backgrounds, rotation/transparency, and stylesheets; usable via web or CLI, with Symfony2 integration.
PDF rendering library and command-line suite — a fork of Xpdf that's become the de facto standard PDF engine underlying much of the open-source PDF ecosystem, powering tools like Evince, Okular, and countless downstream wrappers. Ships pdftotext, pdfimages, pdftoppm, pdftocairo, pdftohtml, pdftops, pdfinfo, pdffonts, pdfdetach, pdfattach, pdfseparate, pdfunite, and pdfsig, covering text/image extraction, page rendering, format conversion, metadata, attachments, and signature verification.
Python ctypes bindings to Google's PDFium: renders pages to images, extracts text, reads metadata/bookmarks/page properties, creates new PDFs and inserts images/pages, and searches for text — with both convenience helper classes and raw PDFium API access.
RubyGhostscript-based document API that generates documents programmatically and converts between PDF, PS, GIF, TIF, PNG, and JPG, wrapping Ghostscript's own command-line interface behind a Ruby-friendly API rather than reimplementing format conversion. Supports EPS templates for merging generated content with pre-designed layouts, plus optimizations for handling large documents without loading everything into memory at once.
Node.js wrapper around PDFtk, Ghostscript, and ImageMagick for PDF manipulation: split/select/reorder/reverse pages, filter even/odd pages, join multiple PDFs, rotate (90/180/270/360°), crop (noted as unreliable), extract text and embedded images, extract metadata/properties, and render pages to PNG at a given DPI.
PHP wrapper around wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltoimage that generates PDFs or image snapshots/thumbnails from URLs or HTML, merges multiple URLs into a single PDF, supports XSL-based tables of contents, and passes through wkhtmltox options (page size, margins, cookies, JS); includes Symfony, Laravel, and Zend Framework integrations.
JavaScriptMicroservice (Puppeteer/headless Chrome) that converts URLs or posted HTML into PDFs or PNG/JPEG screenshots, with configurable viewport, PDF page size/orientation/margins/scale, header/footer templates, page-range selection, cookies/headers, SPA network-idle waiting, and optional API-key auth; deployable via Heroku or Docker.
Headless command-line tool (and C library) that renders HTML into image files using the Qt WebKit rendering engine, without requiring a display server or window manager — useful for automated screenshot/thumbnail pipelines running on a server. Can capture live URLs or local HTML files, applying the same CSS/JavaScript rendering a real browser would. Shares its rendering engine and codebase with the companion wkhtmltopdf; both are archived and unmaintained, since Qt WebKit itself was deprecated in favor of Chromium-based headless rendering.
Handwriting notetaking application (GTK3) that annotates directly on top of imported PDFs: highlight, underline, or strike through selected/copied PDF background text, follow hyperlinks in the background PDF, and export the annotated result to SVG, PNG, or PDF from either the GUI or the command line. Supports pressure-sensitive pen and stylus input (e.g. Wacom tablets), positioning it as an open-source alternative to note-taking apps like GoodNotes or Notability.
C++PDF viewer plus a full command-line toolset (pdftotext, pdftops, pdftoppm, pdftopng, pdftohtml, pdfinfo, pdfimages, pdffonts, pdfdetach) for viewing PDFs and converting them to text, PostScript, image, or HTML, alongside metadata, image, font, and attachment extraction. The original codebase Poppler itself forked from; poppler-utils has since become the more actively maintained fork of these same tools, but Xpdf continues independent development under its original author.
JavaScriptOCR/document-ingestion library (Node/TypeScript and Python implementations) that converts PDFs, Word/Excel/PowerPoint files, and images to page images, then sends each to a vision-language model (OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, Google Gemini, or Vertex AI) to produce Markdown, preserving tables/charts; supports structured JSON-schema extraction, page selection, concurrent processing, and orientation/edge correction.