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The Python PDF generation library reportlab contains a demo/benchmarking application that takes the Project Gutenberg text of Homer's Odyssey and creates a PDF version from it. This text contains 10.437 lines and about 611.000 characters.

The PDF is generated by simply showing each line of the source text, without wrapping or any other advanced text facilities, once using the built-in standard PDF fonts and once using a TrueType font, creating PDF documents with 232 pages.

This is a nice test of raw text output performance and, as noted above, doesn't need any advanced text layout facilities.

In addition to reportlab I have ported the code to Ruby's Prawn, Perl's PDF::API2 and PHP's TCPDF libraries, to have a broader comparison. Note that reportlab has a module implemented in C that replaces various CPU intensive methods. There is an extra entry for that version of reportlab.

The file script.sh is a small wrapper script that calls the binaries and records runtime, memory use and the size of the created

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require 'hexapdf'

doc = HexaPDF::Document.open(ARGV[0])
outline = doc.catalog[:Outlines]
first_entry = outline[:First]
last_entry = outline[:Last]

current = first_entry
loop do
  puts current[:Title]

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HexaPDF is now able to use a TrueType font to generate content. There are still some limitations, like the missing support for subsets but most things work quite well already. Complete integration into the Canvas and font selection API is also not done yet.

The attached script generates a PDF showcasing all available glyphs defined in a font as well as a sample text containing characters from the Unicode BMP as well as from other Unicode planes.

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A short and very unscientific comparison of the performance of HexaPDF to other PDF utilities when reading, eventually optimizing and then writing a file.

When available, multiple compression modes are compares:

• No indicator - no compression done
• C - Compacting by removing unused and deleted objects
• S - Usage of object and cross-reference streams
• P - Recompression of page content streams

For the HexaPDF tests, the hexapdf binary was used with different options for the optimization command:

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I'm currently implementing support for AcroForm radio button fields. The resulting PDF objects look fine to me but the radio buttons won't work in Adobe Reader and Evince.

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HexaPDF - A Versatile PDF Creation and Manipulation Library For Ruby

HexaPDF is a pure Ruby library with an accompanying application for working with PDF files. In short, it allows

• creating new PDF files,
• manipulating existing PDF files,
• merging multiple PDF files into one,
• extracting meta information, text, images and files from PDF files,
• securing PDF files by encrypting them and
• optimizing PDF files for smaller file size or other criteria.

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This is a follow-up benchmark to the one comparing the basic text output performance between Hexapdf, Ruby Prawn and other libraries.

This time the performance of line wrapping and simple general layouting is tested. Again, the Project Gutenberg text of Homer's Odyssey is used for this purposes. The used Ruby scripts are attached below.

The text of the Odyssey is arranged on pages of the dimension 400x1000 and 200x1000, and once with the standard PDF Type1 font Times-Roman and once with the TrueType font Times New Roman. In the case of pages of size 400x1000 no line wrapping needs to be done because each line is shorter than 400 points. In the other case (200x1000) lines need to be actually wrapped and the resulting PDF has roughly twice the number of pages.

Results:

|-------------------------------------------------------------------|

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Edit: I think I found the problem: Acrobat needs the Catalog dictionary to be an indirect reference that is not in an object streams.

• good3.pdf: PDF encrypted with (A)RC4 using V=4, PDF version 1.5, cross-reference and object streams, Catalog dictionary not in the object stream.

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require 'benchmark-driver'

setup_code = <<EOF
require 'ramda'
def transduce(transformation, reducing_fn, initial, input)
  input.reduce(initial, &transformation.call(reducing_fn))
end

PUSHES = -> list, item { list.push(item) }