NextPDF Pro · Edition
NextPDF Pro capabilities
At a glance
Section titled “At a glance”NextPDF Pro is the mid-tier commercial edition. It builds on the open-source NextPDF Core engine and adds advanced document generation, document operations, specialty barcodes, and advanced signing workflows. NextPDF Core produces the PAdES B-B and B-T signature levels; Pro adds remote, cloud-KMS, and sequential signing workflows on top of them. Pro and Enterprise ship together in the Premium package, and a signed license selects which capabilities run.
Pro depends on nextpdf/core. Where a capability extends a public contract
Core declares, your call site is unchanged across Core, Pro, and Enterprise, so
adopting Pro is an upgrade, not a migration. Pro-native capabilities (for example
the incremental Writer or the Stream engine) are called through the NextPDF\Pro
namespace directly.
This page is the section index for the Pro edition. Use the capability map to find the right task-focused page, then follow its Deep Reference for the full API surface.
Start here
Section titled “Start here”- Pro quickstart — install
nextpdf/proand render your first Pro document. - Install and authenticate — add the Composer package, then activate a signed license envelope; the quickstart walks both steps in order.
- License activation — license envelopes, activation channels, and offline operation.
Capability map
Section titled “Capability map”Pro groups its capabilities into five job clusters. Each row links the task-focused capability page first and its Deep Reference second.
Generate & lay out
Section titled “Generate & lay out”| Capability | What it does | Deep reference |
|---|---|---|
| Template | Parse JSON template definitions and bind data to placeholders with type-aware formatting. | Reference |
| Flow layout | Place flow elements across pages with configurable page-break strategies. | Reference |
| Chart | Render bar, line, and pie charts as deterministic vector content, with no rasterization and no headless browser. | Reference |
| Barcode | Specialty 2D and supply-chain symbologies: DotCode, Han Xin, JabCode, Micro QR, rMQR, and GS1 DataBar/Composite. | Reference |
| Table of contents | Collect HTML headings and render a multi-level table of contents as PDF content. | Reference |
| Font tools | Analyze embedded font subsets and plan de-subsetting. | Reference |
| Writer | Write incremental-update revisions behind an append-only integrity gate, with object-stream packing. | Reference |
| Geo | Attach geospatial registration to PDF pages. | Reference |
| Projection | Project content-stream tokens one way for intent-gated redaction and payload embedding. | Reference |
Transform & operate
Section titled “Transform & operate”| Capability | What it does | Deep reference |
|---|---|---|
| Converter | Export the text and basic graphics of an existing PDF to HTML, SVG, or plain text. | Reference |
| Merge | Merge PDFs with bookmark consolidation, page deduplication, and page-range selection. | Reference |
| Diff | Compare two PDFs for text, image, and metadata changes, as JSON or HTML. | Reference |
| Optimizer | Deduplicate objects and analyze image recompression across three tunable levels. | Reference |
| Filter | Reverse the PNG predictor on FlateDecoded streams and parse /DecodeParms. | Reference |
| Form | Read, write, and convert AcroForm and XFA form data. | Reference |
| Document | Split by page range and assemble PDF Portfolios on top of Core document primitives. | Reference |
| Interop | Return versioned, JSON-serializable result DTOs for external integrations. | Reference |
| Print job | Build XJDF 2.1 print-job tickets. | Reference |
| Web view | Serve linearized (Fast Web View) PDFs progressively with byte-range HTTP responses. | Reference |
Extract & understand
Section titled “Extract & understand”| Capability | What it does | Deep reference |
|---|---|---|
| Extraction | Extract cited text and table blocks from a parsed document tree. | Reference |
| Classifier | Classify a document type and detect its language with structural and textual heuristics. | Reference |
| AST | Build an immutable, navigable document tree from tagged or untagged PDFs, with a verified write-back path. | Reference |
| Legal | Apply configurable Bates numbering to document pages. | Reference |
| Stream | Render durably with checkpointed, concurrent, exactly-once commit and crash-safe recovery. | Reference |
Sign & comply
Section titled “Sign & comply”| Capability | What it does | Deep reference |
|---|---|---|
| Security | Mask content, detect text-layer PII, and add remote/cloud-KMS/sequential signing workflows over the Core B-B/B-T signing levels. | Reference |
| Cloud KMS signing | Sign with a key held in AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault, or Google Cloud KMS through one provider contract. | Reference |
| C2PA (preview) | Preview Content Credentials surface: stable Manifest Store extraction with flag-gated draft synthesis. Preview only, not GA in 3.1.0. | Reference |
| Compliance | Report language tags, embed and read e-invoice XML, and, when the default-off C2PA preview is enabled, embed draft C2PA manifests (preview, no conformance claim). | Reference |
Scale & integrate
Section titled “Scale & integrate”| Capability | What it does | Deep reference |
|---|---|---|
| Accelerator | Offload image recompression, parsing, and embedding to a CPU sidecar, with transparent PHP fallback. | Reference |
| Output pipeline | Run a declarative multi-step PDF pipeline with dependency ordering, retries, and Pack-licensed steps. | Reference |
| MCP tools | Expose Pro tools — extraction, comparison, masking, signing — to AI agents through NextPDF Server. | Reference |
Editions and licensing
Section titled “Editions and licensing”NextPDF ships as four distributions: open-source NextPDF, open-source NextPDF Server, NextPDF Pro, and NextPDF Enterprise. Pro and Enterprise are the two commercial editions and ship together in the Premium package; the signed license envelope names the active edition. Editions are cumulative: Pro includes Core, and Enterprise includes Pro.
A deployment without a Pro entitlement does not load the Pro classes. Evaluation output carries a watermark that a paid license removes with no code change. The feature matrix traces each capability to source, and License activation covers authentication, activation channels, and continuity after a subscription ends.