Welcome!

PDF-Nano is a small(ish) library for generating simple PDF files.

The goal of PDF-Nano is to have a lightweight PDF-library usable from Zig, C and Wasm.

Features

The main feature is PDF-Nano's small size. Compiled to wasm, it weighs less than 64kb, making it suitable for embedded devices. To keep the code/binary small only a minimal set of features have been and will be added. Currently the following is supported:

• Text (Latin-1 charset support only)
• Lines
• Tables (fixed layout)
• Colors (font, storke, fill/table background)
• Alignment (left, center, right)

On the todo list:

• Text justify
• Optionally repeat table header on new page

Not on the todo list (due to code size):

• TrueType fonts (if you need a small library you probably don't have space for fonts anyway)
• Pictures such as jpg, png (this would require an image decoder + logic to encode into pdf's raster format)
• Compression

How to build

PDF-Nano is written in Zig, so you will need the Zig compiler. Then simply compile for your target platform (e.g. wasm):

zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseSmall -Dtarget=wasm32-freestanding

Build compatibility

Usage

PDF-Nano provides a text-editor like interface, meaning it handles layouting/positioning for you. See an example here.

#include <pdf-nano.h>

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
    encoder_handle handle = createEncoder(A4, PORTRAIT);
    addText(handle, "Hello world!");
    saveAs(handle, "hello.pdf");
    freeEncoder(handle);
    return 0;
}

There is also a typescript wrapper.