Skip to content
PDF Oxide

Getting Started with PDF Oxide (C++)

PDF Oxide ships idiomatic, header-only C++17 bindings over its Rust core — 0.8ms mean text extraction, 100% pass rate on 3,830 PDFs. Handles are move-only RAII wrappers, native strings and buffers are copied into std::string / std::vector<std::uint8_t> for you, and C ABI error codes are thrown as pdf_oxide::Error. New in v0.3.69.

Installation

The bindings are a single header (cpp/include/pdf_oxide/pdf_oxide.hpp) that links the native cdylib. Build the library once from the repo root, then point CMake at it:

# 1. build the native library (shipped binding feature set)
cargo build --release --lib \
  --features ocr,rendering,signatures,barcodes,tsa-client,system-fonts

# 2. configure + build with the header-only wrapper
cmake -S cpp -B cpp/build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DPDF_OXIDE_LIB_DIR="$PWD/target/release"
cmake --build cpp/build -j

Then include the header in your own translation units:

#include <pdf_oxide/pdf_oxide.hpp>

The C header declares a global Pdf type, so do not using namespace pdf_oxide;. Qualify names (pdf_oxide::Pdf, pdf_oxide::Document) or bring them in with targeted using declarations.

Quick Start

Open a PDF and extract reading-order text from a page. Every fallible call throws pdf_oxide::Error, so wrap your work in a try/catch.

#include <pdf_oxide/pdf_oxide.hpp>
#include <iostream>

int main() {
    try {
        auto doc = pdf_oxide::Document::open("research-paper.pdf");

        std::cout << "pages: " << doc.page_count() << "\n";

        pdf_oxide::Version v = doc.version();
        std::cout << "version: " << static_cast<int>(v.major) << "."
                  << static_cast<int>(v.minor) << "\n";

        std::string text = doc.extract_text(0);   // 0-based page index
        std::cout << text << "\n";
        return 0;
    } catch (const pdf_oxide::Error& e) {
        std::cerr << "error: " << e.what() << "\n";
        return 1;
    }
}

To open a PDF already in memory, use Document::open_from_bytes:

std::vector<std::uint8_t> bytes = load_pdf_bytes();   // from S3, HTTP, a DB…
auto doc = pdf_oxide::Document::open_from_bytes(bytes);
std::string text = doc.extract_text(0);

Markdown and HTML Conversion

Convert a single page — or the whole document — to Markdown or HTML.

auto doc = pdf_oxide::Document::open("paper.pdf");

std::string page_md = doc.to_markdown(0);   // one page
std::string all_md   = doc.to_markdown_all(); // every page

std::string page_html = doc.to_html(0);
std::string all_html  = doc.to_html_all();

std::cout << all_md << "\n";

Word-Level Extraction

extract_words(page_index) returns a std::vector<pdf_oxide::Word> with the text, bounding box, and font metadata for every word on the page.

auto doc   = pdf_oxide::Document::open("paper.pdf");
auto words = doc.extract_words(0);

for (const auto& w : words) {
    std::cout << "'" << w.text << "'"
              << " at (" << w.bbox.x << ", " << w.bbox.y << ")"
              << " size=" << w.font_size
              << " font=" << w.font_name
              << (w.bold ? " [bold]" : "") << "\n";
}

pdf_oxide::Word fields:

Field Type Description
text std::string The word text
bbox Bbox Bounding box (x, y, width, height)
font_name std::string PostScript font name
font_size float Font size in points
bold bool Whether the run is bold

Character- and line-level extraction follow the same shape: extract_chars(0) yields Char records (Unicode codepoint + bbox), and extract_text_lines(0) yields TextLine records (text, bbox, word_count).

Search a single page with search(page_index, term, case_sensitive), or the whole document with search_all(term, case_sensitive). Both return a std::vector<pdf_oxide::SearchResult>.

auto doc = pdf_oxide::Document::open("manual.pdf");

// One page
auto hits = doc.search(0, "configuration", /*case_sensitive=*/false);

// Every page
auto all_hits = doc.search_all("configuration", /*case_sensitive=*/false);
for (const auto& r : all_hits) {
    std::cout << "page " << r.page << ": '" << r.text << "'"
              << " at (" << r.bbox.x << ", " << r.bbox.y << ")\n";
}

Creating a PDF

The pdf_oxide::Pdf builder creates documents from Markdown, HTML, or plain text. Serialize with to_bytes() or write straight to disk with save().

// From Markdown
auto pdf = pdf_oxide::Pdf::from_markdown("# Hello World\n\nThis is a PDF.\n");
pdf.save("output.pdf");

// From HTML
auto invoice = pdf_oxide::Pdf::from_html("<h1>Invoice</h1><p>Amount: $42</p>");
invoice.save("invoice.pdf");

// From plain text, or grab the bytes for in-memory use
auto notes = pdf_oxide::Pdf::from_text("Plain text body.");
std::vector<std::uint8_t> bytes = notes.to_bytes();

Round-trip a freshly built PDF straight back into a Document:

auto pdf  = pdf_oxide::Pdf::from_markdown("# Title\n\nbody\n");
auto doc  = pdf_oxide::Document::open_from_bytes(pdf.to_bytes());
std::cout << doc.to_markdown_all() << "\n";

Error Handling

Every fallible operation throws pdf_oxide::Error, which carries the native error message (what()) and the raw C ABI error code (code()). Handles are also explicitly closable and idempotent: doc.close() frees the native handle early, and use-after-close throws.

#include <pdf_oxide/pdf_oxide.hpp>
#include <iostream>

int main() {
    try {
        auto doc = pdf_oxide::Document::open("missing.pdf");
        std::cout << doc.extract_text(0) << "\n";
        doc.close();   // optional — happens automatically at scope exit
    } catch (const pdf_oxide::Error& e) {
        std::cerr << "pdf error (" << e.code() << "): " << e.what() << "\n";
        return 1;
    }
}

Next Steps