Modernizing the PDF Printing Workflow: Code Migration and New Open Tools

PDF is the backbone of modern printing workflows, but a lot of software still rely on older, heavy libraries with tricky licensing.

Over the last year I’ve been working on finding solutions to this by contributing to OpenPrinting by
(1) migrating the libcupsfilters code from C++ based QPDF library to C based PDFio library, and
(2) building new open tools with permissible licenses

In this lightning talk I’ll show how parts of the current PDF pipeline are being refactored to use PDFio, what changes in practice when you swap out a legacy PDF dependency.

I’ll then introduce two new PDFio-based components:

libpdfrip, a PDF renderer that interprets content streams and targets Cairo.
Swan, a experimental C-based command-line tool for print-centric operations(merge/split, page reordering, image-to-PDF, and PDF inspection.

• My work on libcupsfilters where I refactored the code to use C instead of C++.

• What Swan is and where it fits

• What libpdfrip is and how can it be used in FOSS projects

• Why “license-clean, fully open” matters for distros, vendors and embedded systems

• How these pieces point toward a cohesive, modern PDF toolchain for OpenPrinting