Rust

pdfpecker on crates.io is PdfPecker for Rust: HTML and Markdown to PDF, and PDFs to images, text and Markdown, with a safe Rust API and no runtime dependencies. It is the same library as the NuGet package, compiled ahead of time into a native library, so there is no .NET to install and no browser.

cargo add pdfpecker

The crate version is the PdfPecker version it holds, so everything this manual says about HTML, CSS and paged media applies to it. It needs Rust 1.85 or later on Linux (glibc 2.28 or later and musl, x86-64 and ARM64), macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel) or Windows (x64 and ARM64).

Converting

use pdfpecker::{ImageOptions, PageSize, PdfOptions, TextOptions};

let html = "<h1>Invoice 42</h1><p>Total: <b>1,250.00 EUR</b></p>";
let pdf = pdfpecker::html_to_pdf(html, &PdfOptions::new())?;

// Images and CSS load next to the file.
let invoice = pdfpecker::html_file_to_pdf("templates/invoice.html", &PdfOptions::new())?;
let letter = PdfOptions::new().page_size(PageSize::Letter);
let readme = pdfpecker::markdown_file_to_pdf("README.md", &letter)?;

// One PNG per page, or JPEG or WebP; the text has pages separated by \f.
let pngs = pdfpecker::pdf_to_images(&pdf, &ImageOptions::new().dpi(96.0))?;
let text = pdfpecker::pdf_to_text(&pdf, &TextOptions::new())?;
let both = pdfpecker::merge_pdfs(&[&invoice, &readme], &Default::default())?;

PdfOptions has the settings of PdfOptions as chained methods: page_size, landscape, margin, header_text, footer_text, font, title, conformance (PDF/A), accessibility (tagged PDF and PDF/UA), creation_date for byte-identical output, and more. A document from a string loads no local files unless base_dir names the folder its images, style sheets and fonts are in. The other functions are pdf_to_text_pages, pdf_to_markdown, pdf_to_pdfa, pdf_page_count, library_version and library_path.

Every function returns pdfpecker::Result, whose error has an ErrorKind such as Unreadable, Password, Limit or Timeout. The functions are safe to call from several threads at once and convert in parallel; they block, so async code runs them with tokio::task::spawn_blocking. The crate documentation lists every function and option.

Deploying

The build script downloads the target's native library from the pdfpecker wheel on PyPI, about 9 MB once, and checks it against SHA-256 values the crate carries; cargo run and cargo test then find it on their own. To ship a program, copy pdfpecker_native.so (.dylib on macOS, .dll on Windows) from target/<profile>/build/pdfpecker-*/out/ next to the executable. Offline builds set PDFPECKER_LIB_DIR to a folder that already holds the library.

On musl (Alpine), the program must be linked dynamically to load the library: build with RUSTFLAGS="-C target-feature=-crt-static".

Speed

From Rust on a 4-core Linux cloud VM, median time per document after warm-up, against IronPress, a Rust HTML to PDF crate, and Chrome driven by chromiumoxide. The Chrome score compares each engine's pages with what Chrome prints, over 54 test pages, where 1 is identical:

See Compare for more on the comparison.

What to know

• There is no JavaScript: charts must be SVG or images, not scripts that draw them.
• Nothing loads from the network: images, style sheets and fonts come from base_dir or data: URIs.
• The built-in fonts cover Latin, Greek and Cyrillic. For other scripts, add a font that covers them with font(...), or turn on use_system_fonts. See Fonts.
• The crate is built from PdfPecker.Rust after each PdfPecker release reaches PyPI.