PDFOxide

The Complete PDF Toolkit for Rust and Beyond

Extract, create, and edit PDFs with one library. Rust core with bindings for every language.

                         ┌──────────────┐
                         │  Rust Core   │
                         └──────┬───────┘
          ┌──────────┬─────────┼─────────┬──────────┐
          ▼          ▼         ▼         ▼          ▼
      ┌───────┐  ┌───────┐ ┌───────┐ ┌───────┐ ┌───────┐
      │Python │  │ Node  │ │ WASM  │ │  Go   │ │  ...  │
      │  ✅   │  │ Soon  │ │ Soon  │ │ Soon  │ │       │
      └───────┘  └───────┘ └───────┘ └───────┘ └───────┘

📖 Documentation | 📝 Changelog | 🤝 Contributing | 🔒 Security

Quick Start

Extract text from PDF

let mut doc = PdfDocument::open("input.pdf")?;
let text = doc.extract_text(0)?;
let markdown = doc.to_markdown(0, Default::default())?;

Create a new PDF

let mut builder = DocumentBuilder::new();
builder.add_page(612.0, 792.0)
    .text("Hello, World!", 72.0, 720.0, 24.0);
builder.save("output.pdf")?;

Edit an existing PDF

let mut editor = DocumentEditor::open("input.pdf")?;
editor.add_highlight(0, rect, Color::yellow())?;
editor.add_text_field("name", rect)?;
editor.save("output.pdf")?;

Why pdf_oxide?

• 📄 One library - Extract, create, and edit with unified API
• ⚡ Fast - Rust performance, 53ms average per PDF
• 🦀 Pure Rust - Memory-safe, no C dependencies
• 🌍 Multi-language - Rust core, bindings for Python, Node, WASM, Go

Features

v0.3.0 Highlights: PDF/A conversion, PDF/X & PDF/UA validation, encryption, digital signatures, barcode generation, Office document conversion. See CHANGELOG.md for details.

Installation

Rust

[dependencies]
pdf_oxide = "0.3"

Python

pip install pdf_oxide

Examples

Rust - Extraction

use pdf_oxide::PdfDocument;

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    let mut doc = PdfDocument::open("paper.pdf")?;

    // Extract text
    let text = doc.extract_text(0)?;

    // Convert to Markdown
    let markdown = doc.to_markdown(0, Default::default())?;

    // Extract images
    let images = doc.extract_images(0)?;

    // Get annotations
    let annotations = doc.get_annotations(0)?;

    Ok(())
}

Python

from pdf_oxide import PdfDocument

doc = PdfDocument("paper.pdf")
text = doc.extract_text(0)
markdown = doc.to_markdown(0, detect_headings=True)

For more examples, see the examples/ directory.

Performance

Benchmarked on 103 diverse PDFs including forms, financial documents, and technical papers.

Building from Source

# Clone and build
git clone https://github.com/yfedoseev/pdf_oxide
cd pdf_oxide
cargo build --release

# Run tests
cargo test

# Build Python bindings
maturin develop

Documentation

• Getting Started (Rust) - Complete Rust guide
• Getting Started (Python) - Complete Python guide
• API Docs - Full API reference
• PDF Spec Reference - ISO 32000-1:2008

# Generate local docs
cargo doc --open

Contributing

We welcome contributions! See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

# Development setup
cargo build
cargo test
cargo fmt
cargo clippy -- -D warnings

License

Dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0 at your option.

Citation

@software{pdf_oxide,
  title = {PDF Oxide: High-Performance PDF Parsing in Rust},
  author = {Yury Fedoseev},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://github.com/yfedoseev/pdf_oxide}
}

Built with 🦀 Rust + 🐍 Python | Status: ✅ Production Ready | v0.3.0 | 🚀 53ms per PDF