Skip to content

v0.3.18 | Rendering Engine Overhaul, Visual Parity, and Expanded API

Choose a tag to compare

View all tags
@github-actions github-actions released this 02 Apr 09:03
v0.3.18
e89ddfd
This commit was created on GitHub.com and signed with GitHub’s verified signature.
GPG key ID: B5690EEEBB952194
Verified
Learn about vigilant mode.

Rendering Engine — Visual Parity

Major rendering improvements achieving near-perfect visual fidelity across academic papers, government documents, CJK content, presentations, forms, and complex multi-layer PDFs.

Font Rendering

  • Correct Character Spacing — Fixed proportional width resolution for CID, CFF, and TrueType subset fonts. Documents that previously rendered with monospace-like spacing now display with correct kerning and proportional widths.
  • Embedded Font Support — Render directly from embedded CFF and TrueType font programs, producing accurate glyph shapes that match the original document's typography.
  • Standard Font Metrics — Built-in width tables for the PDF standard 14 fonts (Times, Helvetica, Courier). Fixes uniform character spacing when explicit widths are absent.
  • Improved Font Matching — Better system font fallback for URW, LaTeX, and other common font families. Automatic serif/sans-serif detection for appropriate substitution.

Operators & Path Rendering

  • Fill-and-Stroke Support — Full implementation of combined fill-and-stroke operators (B, B*, b, b*), fixing missing border strokes on rectangles and paths.
  • Clip Path Support — Proper handling of clip-without-paint patterns, resolving issues where body text was hidden behind unclipped background fills.
  • Gradient Shading — Axial (linear) and radial gradient rendering with support for exponential interpolation and stitching functions.
  • Negative Rectangle Handling — Correct normalization of rectangles with negative dimensions per the PDF specification.

Transparency & Compositing

  • Alpha Transparency — Fixed fill and stroke alpha application per PDF specification. Semi-transparent rectangles, images, and paths now blend correctly.
  • Graphics State Resolution — Proper indirect reference resolution for extended graphics state parameters, ensuring alpha and blend mode values are applied.
  • Isolated Transparency Groups — Support for rendering transparency groups to separate compositing surfaces.

Image Rendering

  • Stencil Image Masks — Support for 1-bit stencil masks with CCITT Group 4 decompression. Fixes decorative borders, corner ornaments, and masked image elements.

Page Handling

  • Page Rotation — Full support for the /Rotate attribute (90°, 180°, 270°), correctly rendering landscape slides and rotated documents.

Color Space

  • Separation Color Spaces — Proper tint transform evaluation for Separation and DeviceN colors against their alternate color spaces.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed process abort on degenerate CTM coordinates — A malformed CTM could place text spans at extreme coordinates, causing allocation abort. Projection functions now safely skip the split instead of crashing.
  • FlateDecode flate-bomb protection — All zlib/deflate decompression paths are now capped, preventing a crafted PDF stream from exhausting virtual memory. The cap defaults to 256 MB and can be adjusted via the PDF_OXIDE_MAX_DECOMPRESS_MB environment variable or programmatically with FlateDecoder::with_limit(n).
  • Fixed Clipping Stack Synchronization — Resolved a critical issue where the clipping stack could get out of sync with the graphics state, leading to incorrect content being hidden.
  • Standardized Image Extraction — Refactored the image extraction logic to support document-wide color space resolution.
  • Fixed Python Rendering Accessibility (#240) — Resolved an issue where the render_page method was unreachable in standard Python builds.

Changed

  • Python type stubs — Switched from mypy stubgen to Rylai for generating .pyi from PyO3 Rust source statically (no compilation). CI and release workflows updated.

API — Python

New methods on PdfDocument:

  • validate_pdf_a(level) — PDF/A compliance validation (1a/1b/2a/2b/2u/3a/3b/3u)
  • validate_pdf_ua() — PDF/UA accessibility validation
  • validate_pdf_x(level) — PDF/X print compliance
  • extract_pages(pages, output) — Extract page subset to a new PDF file
  • delete_page(index) — Remove a page by index
  • move_page(from, to) — Reorder pages
  • flatten_to_images(dpi) — Create flattened PDF from rendered pages
  • PdfDocument(path, password=) — Open encrypted PDFs in one step (#247)
  • PdfDocument.from_bytes(data, password=) — Same for in-memory PDFs
  • Pdf.merge(paths) — Merge multiple PDF files into one

API — WASM / JavaScript

New methods on WasmPdfDocument:

  • validatePdfA(level) — PDF/A compliance validation
  • deletePage(index) — Remove a page
  • extractPages(pages) — Extract pages to new PDF bytes
  • save() — Save modified PDF (alias for saveToBytes())
  • new WasmPdfDocument(data, password?) — Open encrypted PDFs (#247)
  • WasmPdf.merge(pdfs) — Merge multiple PDFs from byte arrays

Core Rust API

  • rendering::flatten_to_images(doc, dpi) — Shared implementation for all bindings
  • api::merge_pdfs(paths) — Merge multiple PDFs (shared across all bindings)

Features

  • Rendering Engine Overhaul — Major improvements to the rendering pipeline, achieving high visual parity with industry standards.
  • Batteries-Included Python Bindings — The Python distribution now automatically enables page rendering, parallel extraction, digital signatures, and office document conversion by default. (#240)

🏆 Community Contributors

🥇 @tiennh-h2 — Thank you for reporting the rendering accessibility issue (#240). Your feedback helped us identify that our Python distribution was too minimal, leading to an improved "batteries-included" experience for all Python users! 🚀

🥈 @Suleman-Elahi — Thank you for the suggestion to add flattened PDF creation (#240). This led to the new flatten_to_images() API available across Rust, Python, and WASM! 🚀

🥉 @hoesler — Thank you for the XY-cut projection fix (#274) that prevents allocation abort on degenerate CTM coordinates, and the FlateDecoder configurability improvement (#275)! 🚀

🏅 @Leon-Degel-Koehn — Thank you for fixing the Quick Start Rust documentation (#277)! 🚀

🏅 @XO9A8 — Thank you for improving the PdfDocument::from_bytes documentation (#276)! 🚀

🏅 @monchin — Thank you for replacing manual stub generation with Rylai (#250) and for helping diagnose the password API issue (#247) with a clear workaround and API improvement suggestion! 🚀

🏅 @marph91 — Thank you for reporting the password constructor issue (#247), improving the developer experience for encrypted PDF workflows! 🚀

Installation

Rust (crates.io)

cargo add pdf_oxide

Python (PyPI)

pip install pdf_oxide

JavaScript/WASM (npm)

npm install pdf-oxide-wasm

CLI (Homebrew)

brew install yfedoseev/tap/pdf-oxide

CLI (Scoop — Windows)

scoop bucket add pdf-oxide https://github.com/yfedoseev/scoop-pdf-oxide
scoop install pdf-oxide

CLI (Shell installer)

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yfedoseev/pdf_oxide/main/install.sh | sh

CLI (cargo-binstall)

cargo binstall pdf_oxide_cli

MCP Server (for AI assistants)

cargo install pdf_oxide_mcp

Pre-built Binaries
Download archives for Linux, macOS, and Windows from the assets below. Each archive includes both pdf-oxide (CLI) and pdf-oxide-mcp (MCP server).

Platform Support

Platform Architecture Archive
Linux x86_64 (glibc) pdf_oxide-linux-x86_64-*.tar.gz
Linux x86_64 (musl) pdf_oxide-linux-x86_64-musl-*.tar.gz
Linux ARM64 pdf_oxide-linux-aarch64-*.tar.gz
macOS x86_64 (Intel) pdf_oxide-macos-x86_64-*.tar.gz
macOS ARM64 (Apple Silicon) pdf_oxide-macos-aarch64-*.tar.gz
Windows x86_64 pdf_oxide-windows-x86_64-*.zip

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md for full details.

Contributors

hoesler, monchin, and 5 other contributors
Assets 13
Loading