10 tools
Free, open-source desktop publishing (DTP) application for laying out newspapers, brochures, newsletters, posters, and books, with professional-grade PDF export: PDF/X-3 and PDF/X-4 support, native PDF 1.6 output with embedded OpenType fonts, transparency and encryption, and interactive PDF form fields, annotations, and bookmarks.
GoGo PDF library (pure Go): generates reports/invoices with styled text and tables; creates and fills forms; merges, splits, reorders, and rotates pages (incl. N-up layouts); extracts text (with position/formatting), images, and tabular data to CSV; adds/converts images to PDF; removes or adds password protection; validates and applies digital signatures; compresses/optimizes files; adds watermarks; and supports CCITTFax/JBIG2 image decoding.
JavaCreate and manipulate PDFs, merge documents, digitally sign, create/fill AcroForm fields, PDF/A and PDF/UA generation, encryption (incl. FIPS-compliant crypto), barcode generation, SVG embedding, content redaction, and (via separate add-ons) OCR and HTML/CSS-to-PDF conversion.
Dependency-free JavaScript library (works in browsers, Node, Deno, React Native) to create PDFs from scratch or modify existing ones: add/insert/remove/copy pages, draw text (with embedded custom fonts), images (PNG/JPEG), vector graphics and SVG paths; create and fill AcroForm fields (text, checkbox, radio, dropdown) and read/flatten them; embed pages from other PDFs, split and merge documents, add file attachments, and read/set document metadata.
PDF generation library (Node and browser) with an HTML5-canvas-like vector graphics API (paths, SVG path parsing, gradients, transformations), text with line-wrapping and bulleted lists, embedded/subsetted TrueType/OpenType/WOFF/WOFF2 fonts, JPEG/PNG image embedding, tables, annotations (links, notes, highlights), AcroForms, document outlines, encryption with granular permission controls, and Tagged-PDF/PDF-UA accessibility support.
PHPWrites and reads OOXML (Word 2007+), ODF (ODT), RTF, HTML, and PDF documents: sections with headers/footers/page numbering, styled text runs and paragraphs, tables, images (local/remote/watermark), drawing shapes, charts (pie/bar/line/area/scatter/radar), OLE objects, TOCs, footnotes/endnotes, form fields, lists, template-based generation, and XSL transforms.
PHPPure-PHP PDF/barcode generation library covering PDF/barcode generation, text/graphics, digital signatures, form fields, password/public-key encryption, and HTML/CSS rendering.
UTF-8/RTL text with TrueType/OpenType/Type1/CID-0 font support and subsetting; HTML/CSS and SVG rendering with multi-column layouts, headers/footers, bookmarks, and TOC; JPEG/PNG/SVG images (plus GIF/BMP/TIFF/etc. via GD); RC4/AES-256 encryption; PAdES/PKCS#7 digital signatures with RFC 3161 TSA timestamps and LTV; PDF/A, PDF/X, and PDF/UA compliance modes; page import/reordering; AcroForm fields; and companion-package barcode support.
RubyPDF library and CLI (positioned as a pdftk/Poppler-utils alternative): creates PDFs from scratch with vector drawing, JPEG/PNG/PDF image embedding, and TrueType text with subsetting; a high-level document composition engine (automatic layout, text flow, page breaks, lists, multi-column, reusable styles); modifies and merges existing PDFs; creates AcroForms with Adobe-like appearances; adds annotations, outlines, and file attachments; extracts metadata/text/images/files; encrypts (incl. PDF 2.0 AES-256) and digitally signs; and optimizes file size with object validation.
RubyPure-Ruby framework for parsing, modifying, and creating PDF files, with lazy on-demand parsing: compression filters with predictors, RC4/AES encryption (including Revision 6), digital signatures and usage rights, file attachments, AcroForm/XFA forms, and object streams. Ships CLI tools including `pdfcop` for detecting dangerous PDF content (not a full malware-analysis/forensics suite by the author's own description) plus decompression, decryption, encryption, resource-extraction, and metadata-inspection utilities.