PDFh

PDFh is a lightweight, open‑source software library that provides developers with a comprehensive set of APIs for creating, manipulating, and rendering Portable Document Format (PDF) files. The project was originally started in 2014 by a small team of software engineers interested in providing an alternative to larger, more complex frameworks. Its first stable release, version 1.0, was published in August 2015 and included core features such as PDF generation, text extraction, and form handling.

The library is written primarily in C++ and offers language bindings for Python, Java, and JavaScript, allowing it to be used in a variety of desktop and server environments. PDFh supports all major PDF specifications up to PDF 2.0, and it contains built‑in tools for compressing images, generating PDF/A compliance documents, and encrypting PDFs with standard security protocols. Its API design emphasizes simplicity; developers can create a new PDF document with a single function call and add pages, text, images, and annotations through straightforward method invocations.

PDFh is distributed under the Apache License 2.0, which permits both commercial and non‑commercial use without the need to disclose source code. The project is actively maintained on GitHub, where issues and pull requests are reviewed regularly. According to the GitHub repository, the latest release as of mid‑2026 is version 2.3, which added support for the PDF Embedding Language and improved rendering performance on Linux systems. Community feedback highlights PDFh’s low memory footprint and efficient processing speeds as key advantages over larger PDF frameworks.