Awesome PDF

A curated list of free software (FOSS) resources around PDF files

The File Format

• PDF Association: PDF Specification Index, 2021.
• Jindrich Kubec, Jiri Sejtko: X is not enough! Grab the PDF by the tail! at Virus Bulletin, 2011.
• Selected compilation of PDF Standards from the Adobe Open Source Reference, 2022.
  1. PDF Reference 1.0
  2. PDF Reference 1.2
  3. PDF Reference 1.3
  4. PDF Reference 1.4
  5. PDF Reference 1.5 (v6)
  6. PDF Reference 1.6
  7. PDF Reference 1.7 (ISO 32000, 2008)
  8. PDF Reference 2.0 (ISO 32000-2:2020) (freely available ISO standard due to corporate sponsorship)
• Adobe: XMP Specification Part 3, January 2020.

Viewers

• KOReader: a document viewer primarily aimed at e-ink readers also available on Android
• react-native-pdf: a react native PDF view component
• PdfViewPager: Android widget to display PDF documents in your Activities or Fragments
• vue-pdf: vue.js pdf viewer
• Librera FD: a document viewer for Android with customizable text-to-speech
• ng2-pdfjs-viewer: a comprehensive Angular PDF viewer built on PDF.js with annotations, forms, signatures, search, and read-aloud

Data Extraction

• pdftotext: an application that converts Portable Document Format (PDF) files to plain text. Part of poppler-utils.
• pdfminer.six: a Python library for extracting information from PDF documents
  • pdfplumber: Plumb a PDF for detailed information about each text character, rectangle, and line. Plus: Table extraction and visual debugging.
• Tabula: an application for extracting tables
• camelot: PDF Table Extraction
• xberg: a Rust-core document intelligence framework that extracts text, tables, metadata, and images from PDFs and 97+ formats, with optional Tesseract OCR and bindings for 11 languages.
• invoice2data: Swiss-army knife for structured data extraction from pdf documents.

Generators

Anything that can produce PDF files from scratch:

• fpdf2: An Open Source Python library for generating PDFs
• pdflatex (e.g. in TexLive): A LaTeX-to-PDF converter
• reportlab: An Open Source Python library for generating PDFs and graphics.
• prawn: a pure Ruby PDF generation library
• react-pdf: Create PDF files using React
• markdown-pdf: Markdown to PDF converter
• mpdf: PHP library generating PDF files from UTF-8 encoded HTML

Manipulators

Anything that's used to edit an existing PDF file:

• pdfarranger: a small python-gtk application, which helps the user to merge or split pdf documents and rotate, crop and rearrange their pages using a graphical interface
• OCRmyPDF: adds an OCR text layer to scanned PDF files, allowing them to be searched

File Analysis / Security

• Pdfalyzer: PDF analysis tool to visualize the internal data structure of a PDF in large and colorful diagrams as well as scanning the binary streams embedded in the PDF against a collection of malicious PDF specific YARA rules.
• Malicious PDF Generator: generate a bunch of malicious pdf files with phone-home functionality
• pdfbox: tool in java to browse internally a pdf. Download and use as pdfbox-app-x.y.z.jar debug pdf_file

Multi-Purpose Libraries

• pdftk: command-line tool for working with PDFs. It is commonly used for client-side scripting or server-side processing of PDFs.
• pypdf : a free and open-source pure-python PDF library capable of splitting, merging, cropping, and transforming the pages of PDF files
• pikepdf : a Python library for reading and writing PDF, powered by qpdf
• PyMuPDF : Python bindings to MuPDF.
• pypdfium2 : Python bindings to PDFium.
• borb : reading, creating and manipulating PDF files in python
• pdfcpu : batch processing and scripting via a rich command line
• pdf-lib : Create and modify PDF documents in any JavaScript environment
• HexaPDF: : A pure Ruby PDF creation and manipulation library
• pdf_oxide : Fast PDF toolkit written in Rust with bindings for Python, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#/.NET, Java, PHP, Ruby, and WASM. Text extraction, image extraction, markdown conversion, PDF creation and editing. MIT/Apache-2.0 licensed.