PDFium
Google's BSD-licensed C++ PDF rendering engine, embedded in Chrome.
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 Chrome uses to display PDFs. It parses, renders and rasterises documents, optionally with JavaScript and XFA form support, and exposes headers under a public directory for applications that embed it. It is a library with no end-user application of its own: the only standalone binary in the repository is a test program that rasterises pages to image files.
Best for: Developers who need a permissively licensed PDF renderer to link into their own application or browser.
Worth knowing: It is an engine, not a toolkit: a native PDF engine with rendering, text extraction and low-level document and page editing APIs, and no ready-made consumer editing interface. Its public API declares FPDF_CreateNewDocument, FPDFPage_New and page-object insertion, so it can create a document and place objects on a page. What does not follow from those are a complete redaction tool, an encryption workflow or anything resembling Acrobat editing. Building it means adopting Chromium’s GN, Ninja and depot_tools toolchain.
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 the repository LICENSE file also carrying Apache-2.0 and other third-party licence text
- Redaction
- No redaction feature
- Programmatic access
- Embeddable library
- Last availability check
- Responded in 427 ms 16 October 2026
Checked automatically by our own runner, not reported by the vendor. 80% 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.
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.
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“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
- 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.
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“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
- 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.
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.
Related reading
- Which PDF tools keep your file on your machine — what we count as processing on your own device.
- Open source PDF tools, and what their licences require — what open source does and does not tell you.