libharu

Nim bindings and a small convenience layer for libharu, a C library for creating PDF files.

The public binding targets libharu 2.4.6 and is tested on Linux with Nim 1.6.20 and the current stable Nim release. The loader also selects conventional Windows and macOS library names, but those platforms are not currently covered by CI.

Installation

Install libharu before installing this package. On Debian or Ubuntu, the distribution package can be installed with:

sudo apt install libhpdf-dev
nimble install libharu

Use a libharu 2.4.6 build when calling APIs introduced in that release.

Example

import libharu

let pdf = newPdfDoc()
try:
  let page = pdf.addPage()
  let font = pdf.getFont(HPDF_DEF_FONT)
  page.setFont(font, 14)
  page.textOut(40, page.height() - 40, "Hello from libharu")
  pdf.saveToFile("hello.pdf")
finally:
  pdf.free()

newPdfDoc installs an error callback that only records numeric error data while C code is running. Convenience procedures raise HaruError, including its errorNo and detailNo, after control has returned to Nim. Raw HPDF_* procedures retain libharu's status-code behavior. Custom error callbacks passed to newPdfDoc must also return normally and must not raise an exception across the C call boundary.

Coordinate-based textOut calls manage their own text object. For a sequence of positioned operations, use beginText and endText explicitly:

page.beginText()
page.moveTextPos(40, 700)
page.textOut("first line")
page.endText()

Every document returned by newPdfDoc or HPDF_New must eventually be released with free or HPDF_Free. saveToMemory returns a Nim-owned byte sequence.

The libharu/hpdf module exposes the official hpdf.h API. Other generated modules mirror implementation-oriented libharu headers and are not part of the 2.4.6 public compatibility guarantee.

Tests

The tests require libharu 2.4.6 plus Poppler's pdfinfo and pdftotext tools:

nimble test