genpdf-rs

A user-friendly PDF generator written in pure Rust.

Documentation

genpdf is a high-level PDF generator built on top of printpdf and rusttype. It takes care of the page layout and text alignment and renders a document tree into a PDF document. All of its dependencies are written in Rust, so you don’t need any pre-installed libraries or tools.

// Load a font from the file system
let font_family = genpdf::fonts::from_files("./fonts", "LiberationSans", None)
    .expect("Failed to load font family");
// Create a document and set the default font family
let mut doc = genpdf::Document::new(font_family);
// Change the default settings
doc.set_title("Demo document");
// Customize the pages
let mut decorator = genpdf::SimplePageDecorator::new();
decorator.set_margins(10);
doc.set_page_decorator(decorator);
// Add one or more elements
doc.push(genpdf::elements::Paragraph::new("This is a demo document."));
// Render the document and write it to a file
doc.render_to_file("output.pdf").expect("Failed to write PDF file");

For a complete example with all supported elements, see the examples/demo.rs file that generates this PDF document.

For more information, see the API documentation.

Features

• PDF generation in pure Rust
• Text rendering with support for setting the font family, style and size as well as the text color and text effects (bold or italic) and with kerning
• Text wrapping at word boundaries and optional hyphenation
• Layout of elements sequentially or in tables
• Rudimentary support for shapes
• Page headers and custom page decorations
• Embedding images (scale, position, rotate).

Cargo Features

This crate has the following Cargo features (deactivated per default):

• images: Adds support for embedding images using the image crate.
• hyphenation: Adds support for hyphenation using the hyphenation crate.

Roadmap

These features are currently not supported but planned for future versions:

• Improved support for drawing shapes
• Advanced text formatting

See also the genpdf-rs issue tracker.

Alternatives

• printpdf is the low-level PDF library used by genpdf. It provides more control over the generated document, but you have to take care of all details like calculating the width and height of the rendered text, arranging the elements and distributing them on multiple pages.
• latex generates LaTeX documents from Rust. It requires a LaTex installation to generate the PDF files. Also, escaping user input is a non-trivial problem and not supported by the crate.
• tectonic is a TeX engine based on XeTeX. It is partly written in C and has some non-Rust dependencies.
• wkhtmltopdf generates PDF documents from HTML using the wkhtmltox library. It requires a pre-installed library and does not support custom elements.

Minimum Supported Rust Version

This crate supports at least Rust 1.45.0 or later.

Contributing

Contributions to this project are welcome! Please submit patches to the mailing list ~ireas/public-inbox@lists.sr.ht (archive) using the [PATCH genpdf-rs] subject prefix. For more information, see the Contributing Guide.

If you are looking for a good starting point, have a look at the issues with the label “good first issue” in genpdf-rs’s issue tracker.

Contact

For bug reports, feature requests and other messages, please send a mail to ~ireas/public-inbox@lists.sr.ht (archive) using the [genpdf-rs] prefix in the subject.

License

This project is dual-licensed under the Apache-2.0 and MIT licenses. The documentation and examples contained in this repository are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero license. You can find a copy of the license texts in the LICENSES directory.

genpdf-rs complies with version 3.0 of the REUSE specification.