Open source PDF library for C/C++ application? [closed]

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I want to be able to generate PDF output from my (native) C++ Windows application. Are there any free/open source libraries available to do this? I looked at the answers to this question, but they mostly relate to .Net.

asked Sep 12, 2008 at 11:31 16.9k 10 10 gold badges 60 60 silver badges 82 82 bronze badges

10 Answers 10

Haru is a free, cross platform, open-sourced software library for generating PDF written in ANSI-C. It can work as both a static-library (.a, .lib) and a shared-library (.so, .dll).

Didn't try it myself, but maybe it can help you

7,576 3 3 gold badges 43 43 silver badges 59 59 bronze badges answered Sep 12, 2008 at 11:35 124k 33 33 gold badges 176 176 silver badges 203 203 bronze badges Can we read pdf files with LibHaru or we can only create? Commented Apr 21, 2009 at 14:32 @Rui: only create, unfortunately. Commented Nov 13, 2009 at 1:31

FWIW, I wrote a POCO wrapper for libHaru ( github.com/pocoproject/poco/tree/master/PDF ). We never released it but it is near-production-grade code.

Commented Nov 29, 2012 at 20:09 Unfortunately LibHaru doesn't support reading and editing PDF. So useless for me. Commented Dec 28, 2018 at 13:50 It worth noting that the last commit was in 2015. The library is not being maintained at the moment. Commented Jan 13, 2021 at 6:21

I worked on a project that required a pdf report. After searching for online I found the PoDoFo library. Seemed very robust. I did not need all the features, so I created a wrapper to abstract away some of the complexity. Wasn't too difficult. You can find the library here:

community wiki Building PdDoFo on Mac is a huge pain so I finally gave up trying. Building LibHaru was very easy. – user336063 Commented Jan 23, 2015 at 1:13

Podofo got 2 compiler issues, after adding #include , in two files, was able to build the package. But somehow, the cmake system does not play well on my Linux where I have two versions of GCC (old one came with my Centos6.5, and a latest 5.3 that I build). Linking is an issue. I managed to link the helloworld, but the test program produced a blank document. It is very hard to solve this problem.

Commented Aug 17, 2016 at 18:11

But podofo REQUIRES freetype2 library which is GPL, not LGPL. You cannot make software with use of freetype2 if you want not to make your source public.