• Simple Text Rendering Benchmark
• Benchmark Setup
• Results

Simple Text Rendering Benchmark

The Python PDF generation library ReportLab contains a demo/benchmarking application that takes the Project Gutenberg text of Homer’s Odyssey (contains about 12.000 lines and about 700.000 characters) and creates a PDF version from it. This benchmark is derived from that demo.

No advanced text features are used or needed by this benchmark, only the raw text output performance is tested.

Benchmark Setup

The text of the Odyssey is written onto A4 pages with a margin of 72 points, showing each line of the source text using the most basic text drawing methods available, without line wrapping or text measuring.

To see how the amount of text influences the performance, the benchmark is done by concatenating the text multiple times (1x, 5x and 10x by default). Additionally, all multiplication factors are combined once with the standard PDF Type1 font Times-Roman and once with a TrueType font (DejaVu Sans by default).

Each benchmark script (except the jPDFWriter and pdfkit ones) can be invoked standalone in the following way: script-executable TXT_FILE OUTPUT_FILE [TTF_FILE].

The list of the benchmarked libraries:

HexaPDF

Homepage: http://hexapdf.gettalong.org
Language: Ruby
Version: Latest version

Prawn

Homepage: https://prawnpdf.org
Language: Ruby
Version: 2.4.0

ReportLab

Homepage: https://www.reportlab.com/opensource/
Language: Python
Version: 3.6.12

ReportLab has a module that implements some features in C to speed up the execution. This module is used in the benchmark.

fpdf2

Homepage: https://pyfpdf.github.io/fpdf2/
Language: Python
Version: 2.7.4

jPDFWriter

Homepage: https://www.qoppa.com/pdfwriter/
Language: Java
Version: v2016R1

Qoppa Software provides the free jPDFWriter library which is needed for benchmarking this library. The Java source code file for the benchmark needs to be compiled and the jPDFWriter-JAR put onto the CLASSPATH environment variable.

Note that TrueType fonts don’t seem to be supported.

TCPDF

Homepage: https://tcpdf.org/
Language: PHP
Version: 6.6.2

PDF::API2

Homepage: http://search.cpan.org/perldoc/PDF::API2
Language: Perl
Version: 2.044

PDFKit

Homepage: https://pdfkit.org/
Language: Javascript
Version: 0.11.0

Results

These benchmark results are from 2023-08-03.