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Render, generate, edit, and extract PDF content

This guide shows developers how to perform core PDF operations with PDFluent. It covers rendering PDFs to images, editing documents, and processing annotations.

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Render PDFs to images, anywhere.

Convert PDF pages to PNG, JPEG, or WebP with sub-pixel accuracy. Runs server-side, in Lambda, or via WASM.

rust
use pdfluent::{PdfDocument, ImageFormat};

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    let doc = PdfDocument::open("document.pdf")?;

    let png = doc.render_page(0, 150, ImageFormat::Png)?;
    std::fs::write("page-1.png", png)?;
    Ok(())
}

Generate PDF thumbnails at scale.

Convert first pages or any pages to JPEG/PNG thumbnails. Batch process document libraries without a display server.

rust
use pdfluent::{PdfDocument, ImageFormat};

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    let doc = PdfDocument::open("document.pdf")?;

    for i in 0..doc.page_count() {
        let png = doc.render_page(i, 72, ImageFormat::Png)?;
        std::fs::write(format!("thumb-{}.png", i + 1), png)?;
    }
    Ok(())
}

Run PDF processing in the browser.

PDFluent compiles to WASM. Process PDFs client-side without uploading files to a server.

rust
const bytes = new Uint8Array(await file.arrayBuffer());
const doc = PdfDoc.open(bytes);

// renderPage returns raw RGBA with an 8-byte header: width, height, then pixels.
const raw = doc.renderPage(0, 1.5);
const view = new DataView(raw.buffer);
const w = view.getUint32(0, true);
const h = view.getUint32(4, true);
const imageData = new ImageData(new Uint8ClampedArray(raw.slice(8)), w, h);
ctx.putImageData(imageData, 0, 0);

Edit existing PDFs in Rust.

Replace text, stamp, fill forms and update metadata on documents that already exist.

rust
use pdfluent::{PdfDocument, ReplaceOptions, TextQuery, WatermarkOptions};

fn approve(input: &[u8]) -> pdfluent::Result<Vec<u8>> {
    let mut doc = PdfDocument::from_bytes(input)?;

    // Rewrite text that is already on the page, in its own font
    doc.replace_text(
        TextQuery::exact("Status: pending"),
        "Status: approved",
        ReplaceOptions::default(),
    )?;

    // Stamp every page
    doc.add_watermark(
        "APPROVED",
        WatermarkOptions::centered().opacity(0.3),
    )?;

    // Fill a field and make the value permanent
    doc.form_mut().set_text("approver", "Finance Team")?;
    doc.flatten_forms()?;

    // Update document metadata
    doc.metadata_mut()
        .set_author("Finance Team")
        .set_keywords(&["approved", "processed", "2026"])
        .commit()?;

    doc.to_bytes()
}

Add watermarks and stamps to PDFs.

Apply text watermarks, image overlays, and stamps to single pages or entire documents. Batch watermark with per-document variable data.

rust
use pdfluent::{PdfDocument, WatermarkOptions};

fn main() -> pdfluent::Result<()> {
    let mut doc = PdfDocument::open("document.pdf")?;

    let opts = WatermarkOptions::centered()
        .font_size(64.0)
        .rotated(45.0)
        .opacity(0.15)
        .color(0.6, 0.0, 0.0);

    doc.add_watermark("CONFIDENTIAL", opts)?;
    doc.save("watermarked.pdf")?;
    Ok(())
}

Text extraction. Done right.

PDF text extraction with 97.5% pass rate. Preserve layout, reading order, and font metadata.

rust
use pdfluent::PdfDocument;

fn main() -> pdfluent::Result<()> {
    let doc = PdfDocument::open("document.pdf")?;

    // Plain text
    println!("{}", doc.extract_text()?);

    // Positioned text blocks: text + bounding box + page
    for block in doc.text_with_layout()? {
        println!("p{} {:?} {}", block.page, block.bbox, block.text);
    }
    Ok(())
}