Pure Native PDF Generation

Everything You Need

Production-grade PDF generation with no compromises. Every feature built from scratch.

Try It Live

Pick an example, edit the code, and watch the PDF render beside it — everything runs in your browser via the npm CDN. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.

30-Second Start

Four adoption paths — pick the one that fits your stack. All four are zero-config and zero-build.

npm install pdfnative

import { buildDocumentPDFBytes, extractText } from 'pdfnative';
const pdf = buildDocumentPDFBytes({
  title: 'Hello',
  blocks: [{ type: 'paragraph', text: 'Hello, world.' }],
});
extractText(pdf)[0].text; // 'Hello, world.' — parse any PDF back

echo '{"blocks":[{"type":"paragraph","text":"Hi"}]}' \
  | npx pdfnative-cli render -o out.pdf

# Sign and verify (RSA or ECDSA)
npx pdfnative-cli sign -i out.pdf -o signed.pdf \
  --key key.pem --cert cert.pem
npx pdfnative-cli verify -i signed.pdf

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pdfnative": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "pdfnative-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

npm install pdfnative-react pdfnative react

import { Document, Heading, renderToBytes } from 'pdfnative-react';
const pdf = renderToBytes(
  <Document title="Hello">
    <Heading level={1}>Hello, world.</Heading>
  </Document>,
);

Full onboarding cheatsheet →

Performance

Single-pass string assembly with no intermediate object graph. Measured with vitest bench — run it yourself with npx vitest bench.

Measured 2026-07-30 with vitest bench on an Intel Core i3 mini-PC (Node.js 22.17.0) — mean wall-clock time per document. Full run context, sample counts and relative error: bench/RESULTS.md. The embedded font rows exercise the CID/embedded-font code path using a synthetic TTF on Latin text — they are not a measurement of OpenType shaping or BiDi, which are not currently benchmarked. Faster hardware (Apple M-series, desktop i7/i9) typically runs 2–4× quicker. Results may vary. Run npx vitest bench to measure on your hardware.

Designed for low-impact computing

No carbon claims, no offsets, no badges. Just architectural choices that keep the runtime small, local, and verifiable from the source tree.

Read the full responsibility statement →

Every claim there links to the file that proves it — including an explicit list of what we deliberately do not measure or claim.

AI Governance & Human-in-the-Loop

pdfnative is built with AI coding agents — and it governs them. A machine-readable contract and a human-in-the-loop protocol keep agents in a draftsman role: they may propose, but a human always reviews, approves, and submits. Nothing reaches GitHub autonomously.

Read the full protocol in the AI governance guide, or inspect the source of truth: .github/AGENT_RULES.md and .github/ai-governance.json.

Use pdfnative from your shell, CI, or Makefile

pdfnative-cli is the official command-line interface. 21 commands in five groups, zero extra runtime dependencies, stdin/stdout pipelines, NPM-provenance signed. It covers the whole document lifecycle: author with render, fill, annotate and metadata, restructure with merge / split / extract, secure with sign / verify / ltv / doc-timestamp / encrypt / decrypt — the complete PAdES ladder, B-B → B-LTA — read back with inspect, extract-text and compare, and automate with batch, doctor, schema, completion and the AI-governance govern gate. Installing the package puts a pdfnative binary on your PATH.

# Render → sign → verify, end-to-end
echo '{"blocks":[{"type":"paragraph","text":"Hello, signed world."}]}' \
  | npx pdfnative-cli render -o out.pdf

npx pdfnative-cli sign -i out.pdf -o signed.pdf \
  --algorithm ecdsa-sha256 \
  --key key.pem --cert cert.pem --reason "Approved"

npx pdfnative-cli verify -i signed.pdf --strict