pdfcpu/pdfcpu

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

8801 stars · 625 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

pdfcpu is a PDF processing library and command-line tool written in Go, supporting validation, optimization, encryption, signing, merging, splitting, watermarking, and content extraction. It handles real-world malformed PDFs and supports PDF 1.7 with evolving PDF 2.0 support, usable both from scripts and embedded in Go applications.

Use cases

• merge multiple pdf files into one
• validate pdf files for corruption
• add watermarks to pdfs
• split a pdf into separate pages
• extract images and fonts from a pdf
• encrypt and decrypt pdf documents
• batch process pdfs from the command line
• manipulate pdfs in a go application

When to choose

• you need PDF processing in Go without heavyweight runtime dependencies
• you want a CLI for scripting PDF pipelines including encrypted files
• you need to handle real-world malformed PDFs that violate the spec
• you need validation, optimization, watermarking, or signature inspection

When to avoid

• you need full PDF 2.0 feature support, which is still evolving
• you need to create complex PDFs from scratch with rich layout engines
• you need OCR or text recognition, which pdfcpu does not provide

Facets

library · maturity active

pdf parser cli cryptography image-processing developer-tools pdf files developer-tools go cli cross-platform pdf-processing pdf-manipulation pdf-validation watermarking pdf-merge go-library server-side command-line automation

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="pdfcpu/pdfcpu")