The product

A PDF engine you embed, not a service you call

LumasPDF is a native library that runs inside your process. It creates, edits, renders, secures, signs and converts PDF, and it does all of that without a network connection, a document quota or a per-document fee.

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Documented APIs

1,276

counted from the manual

one per language and platform

Platform targets

10

OS and architecture combinations

How it is put together

One implementation, many front doors

The binding you install is a translation layer and nothing more. Every decision about how a page is laid out, how a font is embedded, how a signature is computed and how a file is written happens in one place.

Step 1

The binding

A package, a unit, a module or a header, idiomatic for your language. It marshals arguments and returns results.

Step 2

The engine

The native library, compiled for your platform. Layout, typography, rasterising, encryption and conformance all live here.

Step 3

The document

A file, a stream or a bitmap — identical whichever binding produced it, because there is only one implementation underneath.

What that buys you

A document generated by a Python batch job and one generated by a .NET desktop client are produced by the same code. Moving a feature between the two is a translation exercise, not a re-implementation.

What it costs

A native dependency in your build, and a licence per platform you ship on rather than one that covers everything. We would rather say that here than have you find it at the second deployment target.

What it looks like

Real output, real components

Documents generated by the engine, shown in the viewer components that ship with it. Screenshots of the actual software, not renderings of it.

An ACME Corporation invoice generated by the engine, open in the LumasPDF embedded preview: header block, billing address, a ruled line-item table and a totals block — An invoice built from code — ruled table, aligned figures, computed totals — in the bundled preview component.

The Northwind Product Catalog at reading zoom in the LumasPDF viewer: a dark header band, a column header row, and priced product rows with alternating shading — The same engine at reading zoom: header bands, column rules and right-aligned money, from a live ODBC query.

The report in the bundled viewer: page 1 of 3, grouped by category from one ODBC query. The diagonal mark is what an unlicensed build adds — a licence removes it, nothing else changes.

Capabilities

Every documented area, with the manual's own count

Ordered by size. These are the areas of the API reference, not a marketing taxonomy — if the manual documents it, it is here, and the number beside it is the manual's.

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Core SDK

Document lifecycle, pages, getters/setters, document info, actions, OCG, structure tree, and general engine services

383 APIs

Rendering & Viewer

The ras* rasterizer, page-to-bitmap APIs, and the built-in viewer window

130 APIs

Forms

AcroForm fields: creation, properties, values, appearance, and form impor

115 APIs

Graphics

Paths, shapes, color spaces, patterns, shadings, transformations, graphics state, and the polygon clipper