Open Source C++ PDF Software

QPDF is a C++ library and set of programs that inspect and manipulate the structure of PDF files. It can encrypt and linearize files, expose the internals of a PDF file, and do many other operations useful to end users and PDF developers.

wkhtmltopdf and wkhtmltoimage are open source (LGPLv3) command line tools to render HTML into PDF and various image formats using the Qt WebKit rendering engine. These run entirely "headless" and do not require a display or display service. There is also a C library, if you're into that kind of thing. The file pdf.h contains a fairly high level and stable pure c binding to wkhtmltopdf. These binding are well documented and do not depend on QT. Using this is the recommended way of interfacing with the PDF portion of libwkhtmltox. The rest of the headers directly exposes the C++ QT dependent class used internally by wkhtmltopdf and wkhtmltoimage. wkhtmltopdf is able to put several objects into the output file, an object is either a single webpage, a cover webpage or a table of contents. The objects are put into the output document in the order they are specified on the command line, options can be specified on a per object basis or in the global options area.

PDF4QT is open source PDF editor based on Qt framework. It contains a C++ library, applications for viewing/editing PDF documents, and a command line tool. PDF4QT is an open-source PDF editor for Windows/Linux. It is a modern solution for viewing/editing/rendering PDF documents, for users and developers alike. For developers, there is a C++ library and a command line tool for use in scripts. For users, there are four applications offering many features. The project is hosted on Github and uses the license LGPLv3. The applications are primarily used by target users to view, edit, manipulate or compare PDF documents. Users can preview these applications in the screenshots section of this webpage. Basic browsing and lots of other functionalities, such as encryption, reading a document, verification of digital signatures, editing of annotations, searching for text using regular expressions, drawing pages into an image, and much more. Several plug-ins are available.

pstoedit is a tool converting PostScript and PDF files into various other formats suported by different drawing editors. As a prerequesite it needs GhostScript to be installed (binary installation is sufficient).

Free editor for PDF documents. Complete editing of PDF documents is possible with PDFedit. You can change raw pdf objects (for advanced users) or use many gui functions. Functionality can be easily extended using a scripting language (ECMAScript).

The PoDoFo library is a free, portable C++ library. It can parse and modify existing PDF files and create new ones from scratch. It also includes several tools to work with PDF files. It features an unique approach which provides access to PDF documents via an object tree. Therefore, PDFs can be created and or manipulated using a simple tree structure. Development of PoDoFo has been moved to GitHub: https://github.com/podofo/podofo Please raise new issues in the GitHub project.

PDF Chain is a graphical user interface for the PDF Toolkit (PDFtk). The GUI supports all common features of the command line tool in a comfortable way.

Gerber2PDF is a command-line tool to convert Gerber files to PDF for proofing and hobbyist printing purposes. It converts multiple Gerber files at once, placing the resulting layers each on it's own page within the PDF. Each layer has a PDF bookmark for easy reference. Layers can optionally be combined onto a single page and rendered with custom colours and transparency. There is a Drill to Gerber converter available from the downloads page.

Vanilla.PDF is a modern, high-performance, open-source C++17 SDK designed for creating, editing, signing, and analyzing PDF documents across multiple platforms. It requires no external runtime dependencies, making it lightweight and ideal for embedding into desktop applications, servers, or automation pipelines. The SDK offers full cross-platform support including Windows, Linux, macOS, and Android, with builds available for major compilers and architectures. Vanilla.PDF supports advanced PDF features such as adding CMS (PKCS#7) digital signatures, modifying content streams and metadata, and working with encryption and permissions based on standard PDF security models. It includes tools for parsing PDF internals like cross-reference tables and objects, providing fine-grained document analysis capabilities. The project is unit-tested with continuous integration pipelines, supporting sanitizers for enhanced code quality and stability.

Preprinting preparation tool for PDF ebooks. On windows create a folder build/ beside src/ directory. PDF v1.7 support. Decrypt encrypted PDFs. Join or Split PDFs. Scale to any paper size, with specified margin. Write Page numbers. Write text and transform pages (rotate, flip, move). Booklet format arrange. 2 or 4 pages per page (2-up, 4-up). More readable output syntax for easy debugging.

PDF Organiser gathers PDF files distributed throughout your system into one place where you can organise them into folders of your choosing. It has minimal dependencies of gtk and json-glib so it is very lightweight and fast with a binary size of less than 45 Kb.