Home

n8PDF

⚠️ Alpha software. n8PDF is in alpha testing: do not use it in production, and do not use it with user-supplied .docx files until more testing is complete. See Prerelease Considerations.

n8PDF converts .docx to PDF, written from scratch. No third-party DOCX or PDF library, no headless Word, no LibreOffice, no browser engine, no sidecar service or container. A consumer adds one assembly reference and calls one method:

Converter.ConvertFile("report.docx", "report.pdf");

Everything happens inside that one assembly: the DOCX container is read, its markup parsed, styles resolved, text measured against the real font files, lines broken and pages composed, and the PDF written — including TrueType/CFF font subsetting and embedding, the Unicode bidirectional algorithm, complex-script shaping, image decoding, chart drawing and equation setting.

What sets it apart is how it matches Word: every layout rule that could not be read out of a specification was measured from Word's own output, with purpose-built probe documents designed so that only one candidate model survives the measurement. Across the comparison suite, line start positions match Word exactly, and what remains is almost everywhere a single step of the 1/300-inch grid Word itself rounds to. See Matching Word for the method.

Where to go

Page	What it covers
Prerelease Considerations	⚠️ Alpha status: why not production, and why not user-supplied documents yet
Installation	Requirements, getting the library, your first conversion, the options
The API	The eight public types — the whole of what a version promises
Promises	Zero dependencies, the frozen surface, warnings-as-errors, deterministic output
Security	The attack surface of reading hostile documents — what is defended, what is honestly still open
Functionality	Everything the converter implements today
Known Gaps	What does not work, what is approximated, and what was declined by decision
Architecture	The one-way pipeline from ZIP to PDF, and the directory map
Matching Word	The fidelity method: measuring Word rather than trusting the spec
Validation	The four test tiers, the three independent external checkers, and what runs where
Developers	Cloning, building, testing, the invariants, and how to submit a PR

Status

• License: MIT
• Target: .NET 10 (net10.0), one shipping library
• Package: n8PDF — the release pipeline exists and packs on every release tag, but the package has not yet been published to NuGet (#61); until then, build from source (Installation)
• Backlog: lives entirely in GitHub Issues, including an open, honest register of security findings from the project's own audits (Security)