Rust API Usage - PdfItDown Docs

PdfItDown is designed to be flexible and highly customizable, while also providing a ready-to-use solution that you can employ in your code immediately without any modifications.

Installation

Add to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
pdfitdown = "4.0"

Or enable parallelized batch conversion with the rayon feature:

[dependencies]
pdfitdown = { version = "4.0", features = ["rayon"] }

Feature flags

Feature	Description	Default
`cli`	Command-line interface (`clap`)	✅
`image`	Image-to-PDF conversion	✅
`office`	Office document conversion (`docx`, `xlsx`, `pptx`)	✅
`markup`	Markdown/HTML and text-based format conversion	✅
`rayon`	Parallelized batch conversion	❌

# Library only — no CLI, only markup and image support
[dependencies]
pdfitdown = { version = "4.0", default-features = false, features = ["markup", "image"] }

# Minimal — markup only
[dependencies]
pdfitdown = { version = "4.0", default-features = false, features = ["markup"] }

Let’s explore three levels of usage:

Level 1: Use PdfItDown as-is

To use the conversion features of PdfItDown, import the PdfItDownConverter struct and the Converter trait:

use pdfitdown::{PdfItDownConverter, types::Converter};

let converter = PdfItDownConverter::new();

Once you have a PdfItDownConverter instance, you can convert single or multiple files, as well as all files within a directory:

let pdf_bytes = converter.convert("business_growth.md")?;
std::fs::write("business_growth.pdf", pdf_bytes)?;

let data = std::fs::read("logo.png")?;
let pdf_bytes = converter.convert(data)?;
std::fs::write("logo.pdf", pdf_bytes)?;

converter.convert_multiple_files(
    vec!["business_growth.md", "logo.png"],
    vec!["business_growth.pdf", "logo.pdf"],
    true, // overwrite
)?;

converter.convert_directory("tests/data/testdir", true, true)?;
// overwrite = true, recursive = true

Each conversion operation returns the PDF bytes (Vec<u8>) or writes directly to a file.

Level 2: Customize

Once you are comfortable with the basics, you may want more control within your application. PdfItDown offers the perfect solution: implement your own Converter trait. Instead of using the default PdfItDownConverter, which can convert almost any file format to PDF, you can provide your own logic by implementing the Converter trait, focusing on specific document types.

The Converter trait requires two methods:

pub trait Converter: Send + Sync {
    fn convert(&self, input: impl Into<ConversionInput> + Clone) -> io::Result<Vec<u8>>;
    fn supported_formats(&self) -> &'static [&'static str];
}

You can also use the provided default methods convert_to_file, convert_multiple_files, and convert_directory.

Here is an example of a custom converter:

use pdfitdown::types::{Converter, ConversionInput};
use std::io;

struct TextOnlyConverter;

impl Converter for TextOnlyConverter {
    fn supported_formats(&self) -> &'static [&'static str] {
        &["txt", "md", "csv", "json", "xml"]
    }

    fn convert(&self, input: impl Into<ConversionInput> + Clone) -> io::Result<Vec<u8>> {
        // Your custom conversion logic here
        todo!()
    }
}

Level 3: Deploy

After defining your own logic, you can easily integrate PdfItDown into any Rust-based web framework such as Axum, Actix-web, or Rocket.

To use PdfItDown in a web server, ensure you handle file uploads and pass the bytes or file paths to the converter.

Here’s how you can use PdfItDown in an Axum application:

use axum::{
    extract::Multipart,
    response::IntoResponse,
    routing::post,
    Router,
};
use pdfitdown::{PdfItDownConverter, types::Converter};
use std::sync::Arc;

async fn convert_pdf(
    mut multipart: Multipart,
) -> Result<impl IntoResponse, impl IntoResponse> {
    let converter = PdfItDownConverter::new();
    while let Some(field) = multipart.next_field().await.unwrap() {
        let data = field.bytes().await.unwrap();
        let pdf = converter.convert(data).map_err(|e| e.to_string())?;
        return Ok(pdf);
    }
    Err("No file uploaded")
}

let app = Router::new().route("/convert", post(convert_pdf));

With this, you have completed the third and final level of PdfItDown mastery!

​Installation

​Feature flags

​Level 1: Use PdfItDown as-is

​Level 2: Customize

​Level 3: Deploy

Installation

Feature flags

Level 1: Use PdfItDown as-is

Level 2: Customize

Level 3: Deploy