CapyPDF

This is a library for generating PDF files. It aims to be very low level. It does not have its own document model, it merely exposes PDF primitives directly.

Features

• Fully color managed using LittleCMS 2
• All fonts are embedded as subsets
• Not implemented in C
• Provides a plain C API for easy integration into scripting languages
• Ships with a ctypes Python binding
• Minimal dependencies

Things the library does not do

• Reading PDF files
• Modifying PDF files
• Supporting any other backend than PDF
• Parsing any vector data files like SVG
• Data conversions in general (apart from colorspaces)
• Supporting PDF versions earlier than 1.7

API stability guarantees

Until 1.0 there is no guarantee of any kind. Anything can be changed. However we try not to change things without a good reason. Once 1.0 happens, we aim to provide the following:

• The plain C interface is both API and ABI stable
• The internal C++ implementation "API" is not stable in any way
• Only C symbols are exported so in order to get to the C++ API you have to change build settings. If you do that, there is no stability guarantee.
• The Python API shall be stable as well

PDF validity

The library shall always generate PDFs that are syntactically valid. Any deviation is a bug that should be reported.

The output is not guaranteed to be semantically valid. PDF has certain requirements for valid documents that can not be checked in a plain PDF generation library. This work needs to be done by the generating application. CapyPDF does have some semantic checks, such as not permitting RGB images in PDF/X3 documents, but they are implemented on a "best effort" basis.

Status

The basic functionality is there and the library can be used to generate fairly complex documents. The APIs are not stable yet, however they are not expected to change much any more.