About PdfNetStack

PdfNetStack is a PDF library and command line tool for .NET, written in C# and published under the MIT license.

Why it exists

PdfNetStack gives .NET developers a PDF toolkit that is permissively licensed all the way down, safe to run on files from strangers, and honest about what it changes. It optimizes, creates, edits, merges, splits and protects PDFs, extracts their text and images, and converts HTML and CSS to PDF.

It started with one narrow job: making PDFs smaller without shelling out to Ghostscript, without a copyleft or commercial dependency, and without silently losing forms, tags or metadata. That job set the rules the rest of the library follows: lossless by default, every rewrite verified, bounded on hostile input, and no native code in the core packages.

Who builds it

PdfNetStack is created and maintained by Jamal Abdelkhalek at JADEV. The packages on NuGet are published by the jadev account.

• Source and issues: github.com/jams4code/pdf.netstack
• Packages: PdfNetStack on NuGet
• Company: jadev-corp.com

The repository is named pdf.netstack. The product, the packages and the namespaces are all called PdfNetStack.

Original work

PdfNetStack is a greenfield project. Its code is original and written from the published specifications: ISO 32000 for PDF, OpenType, Unicode, and the HTML and CSS standards.

Over years of building software, its author has used many PDF and document tools, and their strengths shaped the feature set and the API: PdfSharp and MigraDoc, PDFTron (now Apryse), iText, QuestPDF, wkhtmltopdf, WeasyPrint, PDFium, pdf.js, Poppler and qpdf. HarfBuzz, libjpeg, libtiff and PDFium also serve as reference implementations in the test suite, where outputs are compared.

No source code from any of these projects is included. The few third party data tables the library uses, such as the Unicode character data and the Adobe Glyph List, are listed with their licenses in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md. Product names are trademarks of their respective owners and are mentioned for reference only, without affiliation or endorsement. PdfNetStack is not related to the PDFNet SDK of Apryse.

License

MIT. See LICENSE. On .NET 8 and later the core package has no dependencies; on .NET Standard 2.0 it uses Microsoft’s System.Memory, also MIT. CI blocks any runtime package that is not on a reviewed license allowlist. Runtime dependency licenses are listed in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.

Contributing

Bug reports with a file that is handled wrongly are the most useful contribution. Issues labelled good first issue and help wanted are open to anyone, and roadmap items start with an issue to agree on the approach. The rules are in CONTRIBUTING.md, including the policy for AI assisted contributions. Security issues follow the security policy.

This site

This site is built from the website folder of the repository, in the same pull requests as the code it describes. The API reference is generated from the XML documentation of the source, and every C# sample is compiled and run in CI. Each page is also available as Markdown at the same address with .md instead of the trailing slash, and the whole documentation is in llms.txt for tools and assistants.