a4pdf 0.2.0

A color managed PDF generation library tech preview

A4PDF

This is a library for generating PDF files. It aims to be very low level. It does not have its own document model, it merely exposes PDF primitives directly.

Features

• Fully color managed using LittleCMS 2
• All fonts are embedded as subsets
• Not implemented in C
• Provides a plain C API for easy integration into scripting languages
• Ships with a ctypes Python binding
• Minimal dependencies

Things the library does not do

• Reading PDF files
• Modifying PDF files
• Supporting any other backend than PDF
• Parsing any vector data files like SVG
• Data conversions in general (apart from colorspaces)
• Supporting PDF versions earlier than 1.7

API stability guarantees

Until 1.0 there is no guarantee of any kind. Anything can be changed. However we try not to change things without a good reason. Once 1.0 happens, we aim to provide the following:

• The plain C is both API and ABI stable
• The internal C++ implementation "API" is not stable in any way
• Only C symbols are exported so in order to get to the C++ API you have to change build settings. If you do that, there is no stability guarantee.
• The Python API shall be stable as well

Status

The basic functionality is there but it's not even close to feature complete.