Building from source

The complete build documentation lives in BUILDING.md in the repository. This page is the orientation.

Most people never need this: prebuilt binaries ship with every release, the Docker image is on GitHub's registry, and the WebAssembly build is on npm. Build from source when you are changing the engine, packaging for another platform, or verifying the binaries yourself.

What you need

• a C++17 compiler and CMake 3.20 or newer
• qpdf 12, FreeType, OpenJPEG 2, libjpeg, libpng, zlib and Little CMS, with headers
• OpenSSL, only for --sign
• Google's depot_tools, python3 and about 5 GB of disk, only for the PDFium rasterizer
• Emscripten 4, only for the WebAssembly module
• Node.js 22, only for the npm package, the demo site and these docs

The native engine

cmake -S pdfa-engine -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build -j

That produces build/cli/kura and build/capi/libkura.a. On macOS every dependency is a brew install away; Debian and Ubuntu ship qpdf 11, so build qpdf 12 from source first, exactly as the CI workflows do.

Add -DPDFA_STATIC_DEPS=ON for a binary that depends on nothing but the operating system.

PDFium

Kura links PDFium statically so every surface can rasterize with nothing to install alongside it. It is built from source once:

pdfa-engine/scripts/pdfium/sync.sh
pdfa-engine/scripts/pdfium/build.sh linux-x64     # or mac-arm64, mac-x64, linux-arm64, win-x64, wasm

CMake detects the result automatically. Without it the engine still builds and converts; transparency at PDF/A-1 and PDF/X-1a/X-3 is then reported instead of flattened.

WebAssembly

pdfa-engine/scripts/build-wasm.sh

Fetches and builds qpdf, OpenJPEG and Little CMS for the wasm target, then the engine, into pdfa-engine/build-wasm/wasm/. make npm-pack assembles the npm package from it and make site-sync updates the demo.

Checks

make check     # shell syntax, YAML, version lock, npm smoke test
make fuzz      # a short libFuzzer run

The project's conformance test lanes run against the veraPDF corpus and the public suites; they need veraPDF and several gigabytes of test files and are not part of the repository.