PdfElixide

Elixir bindings for pdf_oxide, a high-performance PDF library written in Rust. Built on top of Rustler.

Features

• Open PDF documents from a file path or an in-memory binary
• Query the PDF specification version
• Get the page count
• Extract text from a specific page
• Extract AcroForm fields (name, kind, value)

Requirements

• Elixir ~> 1.19
• Erlang/OTP compatible with the above
• A working Rust toolchain (stable) for compiling the NIF

Installation

Add pdf_elixide to your dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:pdf_elixide, "~> 0.2.0"}
  ]
end

Then fetch and compile:

mix deps.get
mix compile

The Rust NIF is compiled automatically by Rustler on first build.

Usage

Opening a document

PdfElixide.open/1 and PdfElixide.from_binary/1 are delegated convenience entry points; the rest of the API lives on PdfElixide.Document.

# Open from a file path
{:ok, doc} = PdfElixide.open("path/to/file.pdf")

# Or from an in-memory binary
{:ok, bytes} = File.read("path/to/file.pdf")
{:ok, doc}   = PdfElixide.from_binary(bytes)

Inspecting a document

alias PdfElixide.Document

# Version is read directly from the struct — returned as a {major, minor} tuple.
{1, 4} = Document.version(doc)

# Page count is fetched from the underlying PDF and may fail.
{:ok, 3} = Document.page_count(doc)

# Extract text from a single page (zero-based index).
{:ok, text} = Document.extract_text(doc, 0)

# Source path is the file the document was opened from, or `nil` when it was loaded from a binary.
"path/to/file.pdf" = Document.source_path(doc)

Each fallible function ships with a bang variant that returns the value directly and raises on error:

doc   = PdfElixide.open!("path/to/file.pdf")
pages = PdfElixide.Document.page_count!(doc)
text  = PdfElixide.Document.extract_text!(doc, 0)

Extracting form fields

PdfElixide.Form.fields/1 returns the AcroForm fields of the document as a list of %PdfElixide.Form.Field{} structs:

{:ok, fields} = PdfElixide.Form.fields(doc)

Enum.each(fields, fn %PdfElixide.Form.Field{name: name, kind: kind, value: value} ->
  IO.inspect({name, kind, value})
end)

Each field carries:

• :name — the field's PDF name (String.t())
• :kind — one of :button | :text | :choice | :signature | :unknown
• :value — one of {:text, String.t()} | {:boolean, boolean()} | {:name, String.t()} | {:array, [String.t()]} | nil

A bang variant, PdfElixide.Form.fields!/1, returns the list directly and raises on error.

Documentation

Full API documentation is published on HexDocs.

License

Released under the MIT License.