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PDFium

Google's BSD-licensed C++ PDF rendering engine, embedded in Chrome.

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Since 2014

Operated by The PDFium Authors

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Jobs covered

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loading, parsing and rendering PDFs with PDFium's public API, where the C API exposes document loading, page handles, bitmap rendering, text extraction and search, form display/filling, annotations and tagged-structure/accessibility APIs; Chromium's pdf/pdfium wrappers additionally implement document loading, page rendering, text runs, selection/caret, form integration, accessibility and save-data paths for Chrome's viewer.

The scope records the engine and wrapper parsing/rendering/text/form/annotation/accessibility surface and the test program's rasterisation role, and makes clear that PDFium is not a standalone viewer, has no OCR engine, and is distinct from Chrome's end-user UI; no redaction, signing/trust or format conversion is claimed

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using PDFium's low-level public edit API, where public/fpdf_edit.h documents FPDF_CreateNewDocument, FPDFPage_New, page-object creation and insertion (including FPDFPageObj_NewTextObj and FPDFText_SetText), transforms and flattening; public/fpdf_formfill.h and fpdf_annot.h document form filling and annotation creation; and public/fpdf_save.h documents FPDF_SaveAsCopy with incremental/no-incremental/remove-security flags.

The scope records low-level document, page and object creation/manipulation and save-copy operations exposed to embedding developers, and makes no general Acrobat-style editing interface, arbitrary body-text layout editing, complete redaction, encryption-creation, signing or certificate-trust claim; signature APIs are inspection-only and OCR/Office conversion are not provided

Where your files are processed

No server involved

An in-process C++ rendering engine with no service component, so documents are parsed and rendered inside the host process. That is a property of the library itself: what an application built with it does with your file depends on that application, not on this.

Inherent to the technology rather than a vendor claim: an in-process C++ rendering engine with no service component, so documents are parsed and rendered inside the host process and never leave the machine. There is no data residency question because there is no service.

What it does

PDFium is the open-source C++ PDF engine that Chrome uses to display PDFs. It is a source dependency rather than a released product: GitHub has no PDFium releases, and the meaningful revision is the PDFium commit pinned by Chromium's DEPS file, currently a50f1a5953264de698f398fe3a2ef6153677fafa.

The engine loads and renders pages, rasterises them, extracts text and supports text search, displays and fills forms, handles annotations, exposes tagged-structure/accessibility APIs, and provides a low-level public edit API that can create documents and pages, add page objects, fill forms, add annotations and save a copy. It also has signature inspection APIs but no signing API, OCR, redaction or encryption-creation workflow.

PDFium is a library with no end-user application; the repository's standalone test program rasterises pages for testing, and the real user-facing PDF interface is Chromium's wrapper and Chrome's built-in viewer. Building it means using Chromium's GN, Ninja and depot_tools toolchain, and official source/build support is separate from Chrome/Chromium's end-user platform support.

Best for

Developers who need a permissively licensed PDF renderer to link into their own application or application.

Worth knowing

PDFium has no normal product release feed: GitHub reports no releases, and the meaningful version is a moving source revision. This record uses the Chromium DEPS pin a50f1a5953264de698f398fe3a2ef6153677fafa; that pin changes as Chromium rolls PDFium, so it is a snapshot rather than a stable version.

There are no official standalone PDFium binaries or end-user application; the repository test program is a rasterisation test, and users normally encounter PDFium through Chromium's wrapper or Chrome's built-in viewer. Building requires Chromium's GN, Ninja and depot_tools toolchain; the Windows, Linux, macOS and Android build surfaces are source/build support, not a promise of packaged binaries.

The LICENSE is not BSD-only: it opens with BSD-3-Clause and continues with the full Apache-2.0 and third-party notices. The public API is low-level: it can load and render pages, extract text, search, fill forms, handle annotations and accessibility structure, create documents/pages and page objects, and save a copy; it is not a general Acrobat-style editor and does not provide arbitrary body-text editing, a complete redaction workflow, encryption creation or a signing API.

Signature support is inspection only (FPDF_GetSignatureCount/FPDF_GetSignatureObject), not certificate signing or trust. Encrypted documents can be opened and saved with FPDF_REMOVE_SECURITY, but that is security removal, not an encryption workflow.

The Chromium wrapper has accessibility/OCR service hooks for Chromium's own UI, but OCR is not a PDFium engine capability. No Office conversion, hosted service, certificate trust, signing or universal rendering/accuracy guarantee is claimed.

Details, and where each comes from

Vendor statements, our own reading of their pages, and the things nobody has established yet, each answered separately. Where we have not confirmed something it says so rather than guessing, and a row nobody has established is greyed out.

Versions covered
Windows · macOS · Linux · Android
Website
pdfium.googlesource.com
Requires an account
Not applicable
Watermark on the free tier
No
Maximum file size
Not verified
Batch processing
Not verified
Data residency
Self-hosted
Open source
Yes
Self-hostable
Yes
Licence
BSD-3-Clause for PDFium itself, with a LICENSE file that also carries the full Apache...

BSD-3-Clause for PDFium itself, with a LICENSE file that also carries the full Apache License 2.0 and further third-party licence text. The copyright line is The PDFium Authors.

PDFium is a Google-maintained open-source project built with Chromium's GN/Ninja/depot_tools toolchain; there is no product release feed and no paid edition.

Redaction
No redaction feature
Programmatic access
Embeddable library
Last availability check
Responded in 477 ms 21 October 2026

Checked automatically by our own runner, not reported by the vendor. 83.3% of our last 30 checks got a response.

What the redaction verdict rests on

From the vendor's own documentation, read 22 September 2026. Not tested by us.

What that does not establish

The vendor’s own site was read on 22 September 2026 and contains no mention of redaction, sanitisation, blackout or whiteout. Absence from a vendor’s own material is not proof that a feature does not exist - it may be undocumented, or on a page the reading did not reach - but for a NEGATIVE claim it is the strongest evidence available, and it is weaker than a positive quote.

Recorded as such rather than presented as certainty.

https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium/

What the vendor says

Claims are labelled rather than repeated as fact. Where we have checked something ourselves, it says so and shows when. Checked means we read the vendor's own page and it says what we recorded - not that we tested the behaviour, unless the note says we did.

  • “The pdfium_test program supports reading, parsing, and rasterizing the pages of a .pdf file to .ppm or .png output image files (Windows supports two other formats).”

    Checked by us - the source says this Read 22 September 2026

    Confirmed verbatim: the sentence appears unaltered in the build instructions, including the parenthetical about Windows. It is a statement about a test program rather than about the library's API surface, and the surrounding text explains why: pdfium_test is not built by default, because the default build minimises build time for embedders, and the standalone test program has to be requested explicitly.

    So the capability described is real but is something a developer has to opt into building. Recorded as the project's own documentation; no control was run and no build was attempted.

    Standing: Re-read: the text is unchanged, but the page publishes values that move

    Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
    Read
    https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium/
    From
    the text a browser renders
    SHA-256
    2b4498993b85bbb87cb2234875ec011d569da7c05f2bd170f9edca9d8fa8a9d2

    How we checked

    Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium/ re-rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs and the claim's wording found in the rendered text. Originally verified on 2026-09-21. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the re-rendered text, held as rv-pdfium-googlesource-com-pdfium-63185c2b.txt.

    What this hash proves, and what it does not

  • “PDFium may be built either with or without JavaScript support, and with or without XFA forms support.”

    Checked by us - the source says this Read 22 September 2026

    Confirmed verbatim, and the sentences after it are the ones that make it actionable: "Both of these features are enabled by default. Also note that the XFA feature requires JavaScript." So the build choice described in the claim has a default - both on - and a dependency between the two options that is easy to miss: building without JavaScript also removes XFA, because XFA needs it.

    That is the kind of detail a reader making a build decision needs and a capability summary would not supply.

    Standing: Re-read: the text is unchanged, but the page publishes values that move

    Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
    Read
    https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium/
    From
    the text a browser renders
    SHA-256
    2b4498993b85bbb87cb2234875ec011d569da7c05f2bd170f9edca9d8fa8a9d2

    How we checked

    Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium/ re-rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs and the claim's wording found in the rendered text. Originally verified on 2026-09-21. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the re-rendered text, held as rv-pdfium-googlesource-com-pdfium-63185c2b.txt.

    What this hash proves, and what it does not

Each claim is quoted from the vendor's own pages. This section describes what we have and have not checked - it is not a judgement about anyone.

Sponsorship is distribution, not an endorsement or a promise of search rankings, AI citations, traffic, or sales. This listing is a free entry, compiled from published sources.

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Related reading

How this record was put together

Editorial review.
No editor has signed this record off. That is not the same as nothing having been checked, and the lines below say what has.
Source reading.
2 claims taken from the vendor's own pages, read between 22 September 2026 and 22 September 2026.
Website availability.
The vendor's site was last checked on 21 October 2026.
Behaviour testing.
We ran this ourselves. The file handling was watched directly.

Sources: pdfium.googlesource.com (project home, LICENSE file); opensource.google project listing; InfoQ report on the 2014 open-sourcing.