PDFsharp
MIT-licensed .NET library for creating PDFs with GDI+-style drawing and for modifying, merging and splitting existing ones.
Operated by empira Software GmbH
Where your files are processed
No server involved
A .NET library compiled into the calling application. It has no server component and no vendor endpoint. 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.
It is an embedded .NET library, so it runs in the process of the application that references it. That describes the library rather than the application hosting it, and API documentation is not evidence that a configured application makes no network calls, so no exhaustive traffic claim is made here.
What it does
PDFsharp is a .NET library for building and editing PDF documents in code, developed by empira Software in Germany and paired with MigraDoc, a higher-level document object model that handles layout, tables and page breaks. It draws pages with the drawing routines familiar from GDI+ — lines, paths, images with alpha and colour masks, embedded TrueType and OpenType fonts, form XObjects and gradient brushes — and it can open existing files to modify, merge and split them, write 40-bit and 128-bit passwords, apply PDF 2.0 AES-256 encryption and set document access permissions.
Best for: Teams embedding PDF generation or light PDF manipulation in a .NET application, on a modern .NET runtime or .NET Framework 4.6.2, who want a permissively licensed library with a long track record rather than a commercial SDK.
Worth knowing: It lacks a PDF renderer, so it cannot turn a PDF into an image; the documentation says to shell out to Adobe Reader or Ghostscript for that. It does provide a preview control for drawing operations, which is a different thing from rendering an imported PDF. High-level content and extraction helpers are missing rather than low-level access being absent. Text extraction and editing the content of an existing page are both absent at the API level — you can reach characters through the low-level CLexer class but it returns drawn characters in draw order, not words or paragraphs, so it is not a text-extraction tool. There is no PDF/A compliance in the stable 6.2 line, AcroForms support is explicitly 'limited', and the portable Core build only accepts BMP, PNG and JPEG images and needs you to supply a FontResolver or it will find no fonts on Linux or macOS.
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 · Self-hosted
- Website
- docs.pdfsharp.net
- Requires an account
- Not applicable
- Watermark on the free tier
- Not verified
- Maximum file size
- Not verified
- Batch processing
- Yes
- Data residency
- Self-hosted
- Open source
- Yes
- Self-hostable
- Yes
- Licence
- MIT
- Redaction
- No redaction feature
- Programmatic access
- Embeddable library
- Last availability check
- Responded in 181 ms 16 October 2026
Checked automatically by our own runner, not reported by the vendor. 100% 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.
-
“This project is actively maintained by the PDFsharp Team. Professional assistance for production is available upon request.”
Checked by us — the source says this Read 21 September 2026
Confirmed verbatim: the claim is two consecutive lines of the README. It is a maintenance-status claim, which is the kind this index should carry for any library a reader might build on, and the two halves say different things. "Actively maintained by the PDFsharp Team" is a statement about the project; "professional assistance for production is available upon request" is a statement about a commercial support arrangement, and "upon request" is doing quiet work — it means the assistance is not free. A reader choosing a library for production should read the second line as an offer rather than as a guarantee of support. Recorded as the project's description; no control was run.
Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- 7c24146c797a515e9973e8e61a3e8affbc63f71d2eb32d7002aedde69d02a767
How we checked: https://github.com/empira/PDFsharp rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs on 2026-09-21 (visible text 3424 bytes). sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the rendered text.
-
“PDFsharp comes with a preview control designed to visualize drawing operations of the XGraphics object, but it cannot render PDF files.”
Checked by us — the source says this Read 22 September 2026
Confirmed verbatim: the sentence appears unaltered in the FAQ. It is a negative capability statement, and it exists because the project's own name invites the wrong expectation — a reader could reasonably assume a PDF library ships a PDF viewer. The page is being clear that the preview control draws XGraphics operations rather than reading PDF files, which is the distinction between a library that creates PDFs and one that displays them. Recorded as the project's documentation; no library was installed and no control was run.
Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- 715862a02b0643201e3b3219a25535d4cec1c52d45899d10426e0445c3b756bf
How we checked: Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://docs.pdfsharp.net/PDFsharp/Overview/FAQ.html 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-docs-pdfsharp-net-PDFsharp-Overview-FAQ-html-a1007263.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.