yfedoseev/pdf_oxide v0.3.18

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

on GitHub

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

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md for full details.