Implementing functionality to create PDFs and to modify the existing ones from scratch is a daunting task for any developer. No matter how careful we are, there will be edge cases that one might not take into account which can cause terrible bugs within the application. That is the reason why developers normally tend to go with existing libraries that have PDF generation and PDF parsing functionalities builtin, saving valuable time and resources. So we’ve handpicked top 5 popular open source PDF generation and PDF parsing libraries for you to use in your project in this post.
As of writing this post, Stirling PDF has a whopping 44.3K stars on Github. It supports almost every PDF related functionality that one might need in an application. It provides a web application UI by default that performs various operations on PDFs, but we can also enable api only mode. Some of the features it supports are:
OpenPDF is an open source Java library that can perform numerous PDF operations. It can create PDF files from scratch or modify existing ones by adding pages, modifying text etc.; It supports encryption, extracting text, adding graphics or images, creation of tables within PDFs and also modifying layout of PDFs. OpenPDF is a fork of iText and we can use it a maven dependency in a Java project.
As the name suggests, PyPDF is a pure Python library. It can handle numerous PDF operations like splitting, merging, cropping, transforming, adding custom data, adding password protection. You can also use PyPDF with AES encryption and decryption. In comparison to Stirling PDF, PyPDF is very light. You can learn more about PyPDF in its website.
Built with Typescript and React. Apart from having powerful PDF generation capabilities, it also features a WYSIWYG template designer and PDF viewer. Using PDFme, one can easily create custom PDFs in both browser and NodeJS environments. It is also a very cost effective option as the author of the library itself is using it to generate more than 100k custom PDFs every month and only incurring a cost of $10.
Gotenberg provides a docker powered stateless API to convert various document formats to PDF files. Its developer friendly API interacts with tools like Chromium and LibreOffice to convert files to PDF formats. Though it doesn’t provide powerful PDF operations as the above listed libraries, it does a very good job in converting different document formats to PDF files by interacting with installed tools like LibreOffice. You can learn more about Gotenberg in its website.
