Open source PDF library for C/C++ application?

Question

I want to be able to generate PDF output from my (native) C++ Windows application. Are there any free/open source libraries available to do this?

I looked at the answers to this question, but they mostly relate to .Net.

score 67 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 22 '16 at 11:57

67

LibHaru

Haru is a free, cross platform, open-sourced software library for generating PDF written in ANSI-C. It can work as both a static-library (.a, .lib) and a shared-library (.so, .dll).

Didn't try it myself, but maybe it can help you

edited Apr 22 '16 at 11:57

Daniil Ryzhkov

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answered Sep 12 '08 at 11:35

aku

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Can we read pdf files with LibHaru or we can only create? – Rui Carneiro Apr 21 '09 at 14:32
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@Rui: only create, unfortunately. – Mark Ransom Nov 13 '09 at 01:31
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FWIW, I wrote a POCO wrapper for libHaru ( https://github.com/pocoproject/poco/tree/master/PDF ). We never released it but it is near-production-grade code. – Alex Nov 29 '12 at 20:09
Unfortunately LibHaru doesn't support reading and editing PDF. So useless for me. – freeze Dec 28 '18 at 13:50
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It worth noting that the last commit was in 2015. The library is not being maintained at the moment. – Eugene Jan 13 '21 at 06:21
This is a good library. – Land Nov 24 '22 at 12:20

score 20 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 06 '09 at 16:16

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I worked on a project that required a pdf report. After searching for online I found the PoDoFo library. Seemed very robust. I did not need all the features, so I created a wrapper to abstract away some of the complexity. Wasn't too difficult. You can find the library here:

http://podofo.sourceforge.net/

Enjoy!

answered Jan 06 '09 at 16:16

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Building PdDoFo on Mac is a huge pain so I finally gave up trying. Building LibHaru was very easy. – Jan 23 '15 at 01:13
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Podofo got 2 compiler issues, after adding #include , in two files, was able to build the package. But somehow, the cmake system does not play well on my Linux where I have two versions of GCC (old one came with my Centos6.5, and a latest 5.3 that I build). Linking is an issue. I managed to link the helloworld, but the test program produced a blank document. It is very hard to solve this problem. – Kemin Zhou Aug 17 '16 at 18:11
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But podofo REQUIRES freetype2 library which is **GPL, not LGPL**. You cannot make software with use of freetype2 **if you want not to make your source public.** – 18C Aug 24 '17 at 18:35
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@18C : Freetype allows inclusion in commercial closed source applications. See [this](https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5144/is-it-safe-to-use-freetype-inside-a-proprietary-closed-source-software) – Congenital Optimist Nov 12 '18 at 11:18

score 18 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 12 '08 at 11:41

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If you're brave and willing to roll your own, you could start with a PostScript library and augment it to deal with PDF, taking advantage of Adobe's free online PDF reference.

answered Sep 12 '08 at 11:41

Tyler

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score 10 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 24 '13 at 07:36

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jagpdf seems to be one of them. It is written in C++ but provides a C API.

answered Oct 24 '13 at 07:36

Sangcheol Choi

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score 8 · Answer 5 · answered Jan 03 '13 at 00:56

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PDF Hummus. see for http://pdfhummus.com/ - contains all required features for manipulation with PDF files except rendering.

answered Jan 03 '13 at 00:56

Lidia Mirkin

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I did a large PDF-Export with Hummus recently and can recommend it. Probably not complete in terms of covering all features of the current PDFSpec (which is quite exhaustive), but easy to understand and good extensible through a callback class with a number of virtual functions (https://github.com/galkahana/PDF-Writer/blob/master/PDFWriter/DocumentContextExtenderAdapter.h). Contains TIFF/JPEG handling and the freetype library for font handling. – RED SOFT ADAIR May 27 '14 at 12:14
have you been able to compile it as a dynamic linked library? Or does it support just static linked library? – Sam Sep 12 '18 at 13:57

score 8 · Answer 6 · answered Sep 12 '08 at 12:00

8

It depends a bit on your needs. Some toolkits are better at drawing, others are better for writing text. Cairo has a pretty good for drawing (it support a wide range of screen and file types, including pdf), but it may not be ideal for good typography.

answered Sep 12 '08 at 12:00

Leon Timmermans

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score 5 · Answer 7 · answered May 13 '12 at 11:52

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muPdf library looks very promising: http://mupdf.com/

There is also an open source viewer: http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-reader.html

answered May 13 '12 at 11:52

Peter

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It looks like muPdf is for rendering PDFs, not generating them? – vy32 Aug 20 '12 at 21:16
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@vy32 Looking at the source I would say generating pdf-files is at best work in progress and not the primary goal of `muPdf` – matec Jun 22 '14 at 19:44

score 5 · Answer 8 · edited Feb 28 '12 at 02:31

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LibHaru seems to be used by many.

A non-open source approach is: PDF Creator Pilot which provides more language options including C++, C#, Delphi, ASP, ASP.NET, VB, VB.NET, VBScript, PHP and Python

edited Feb 28 '12 at 02:31

vy32

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answered Sep 12 '08 at 11:57

prakash

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score 2 · Answer 9 · answered Nov 24 '13 at 09:56

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Try wkhtmltopdf

Software features

Cross platform. Open source. Convert any web pages into PDF documents using webkit. You can add headers and footers. TOC generation. Batch mode conversions. Can run on Linux server with an XServer (the X11 client libs must be installed). Can be directly used by PHP or Python via bindings to libwkhtmltox.

answered Nov 24 '13 at 09:56

M.Hefny

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This is good. But, as it use dated webkit, some pages may complaint (youtube for example) – swdev Aug 31 '14 at 23:31

score 1 · Answer 10 · answered Feb 13 '13 at 19:30

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http://wxcode.sourceforge.net/docs/wxpdfdoc/

Works with the wxWidgets library.

answered Feb 13 '13 at 19:30

Taran Rampersad

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Open source PDF library for C/C++ application?

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