Get Started with the Apryse Server SDK C++ PDF Library Integration

This guide walks you through steps to integrate the Apryse Server SDK free trial into your project. We’ll use a C++ project as our example project throughout this guide. By the end, you’ll have built a simple PDF-generation application and be able to open, save, and close a PDF Doc.

Windows

Windows C++ PDF library integration

This section helps you get started with one of our samples to see the output you can create when you integrate the Apryse Server SDK into your application. It also includes instructions on how to create a C++ project, then integrate Server SDK into the project. In the end, you’ll create and open a blank PDF within your project.

Prerequisites

Before you start:

• Install Visual Studio 2022 (during installation, select the “Desktop Development for C++ workload” to ensure Windows SDK is included) to write, build, test, and deploy your application.

• Download Apryse’s C++ PDF Library for Windows zip file: Apryse Server SDK 64-bit.

• Get your Apryse trial key.

Run Apryse SDK in production.

A commercial license key is required for use in a production environment. Contact sales by filling out our licensing form if you want to purchase a commercial license key.

Keep your commercial license key confidential.

License keys are uniquely generated and strictly confidential. Don't publish or store them in any public location, including public GitHub repositories.

1. Run a PDFNet sample project

In this section, you will download and run the OfficeToPDFTest PDFNet sample module, which demonstrates the SDK's document-conversion capabilities. Upon successful completion, you will have converted a DOCX document to a PDF file while leveraging the MS Office-to-PDF conversion API. You can use this module as a reference implementation when integrating similar document-conversion functionality into your own applications. By running the sample, you can quickly:

• Verify the capabilities.

• Understand how to interact with the MS Office to Conversion PDF API.

• Use it as a reference for integrating similar functionality into your own application.

1. Download the PDFNetC64.zip file.

2. Extract the PDFNetC64.zip file to the following location: C:\Users\YourName\PDFNetC64\PDFNetC64\Samples. Replace YourName with your user name.

• You can install the samples to another location if you prefer, but for this guide’s instructions, we used the location above.

• Each time a step in this guide refers to the file path: C:\Users\YourName... replace YourName with your user name.

1. Before running the sample, you need to add your license key to the LicenseKey.h file. Open Visual Studio, select File > Open > File... and navigate to: C:\Users\Your Name\PDFNetC64\PDFNetC64\Samples\LicenseKey\CPP (CPP or CPPS folder, depending on your distribution).

2. Select the LicenseKey.h file and click Open.

3. In the LicenseKey.h file, scroll down to the line containing //#define LicenseKey “YOUR_PDFTRON_LICENSE_KEY”. Uncomment this line (remove the // ) and replace the words in quotes with the copy of your trial license key you generated when you completed the Prerequisites instructions above. Do not change any other information in this file.

4. Save your changes and close the LicenseKey.h file.

5. In Visual Studio, select File > Open > Project/Solution and navigate to: C:\Users\Your Name\PDFNetC64\PDFNetC64\Samples\OfficeToPDFTest\CPP (CPP or CPPS folder, depending on your distribution).

6. Select the OfficeToPDFTestVC2019.vcxproj file and click Open. If a Retarget Projects dialog displays, click OK.

7. From the Main menu, select Build > Build Solution. After building, the output pane shows Build Completed.

8. From the Main menu, select Debug > Start Without Debugging.

9. The sample code loads an Office document, converts the Office document to PDF, saves the resulting PDF, and outputs status messages to the console. For more details, you can look at additional OfficeToPDF sample code and the Convert MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) to PDF overview.

Once the sample has finished running, a command line window opens showing the demo mode is Done. Press any key to close the command line window.

1. Go to your File Explorer and navigate to: C:\Users\YourName\PDFNetC64\PDFNetC64\Samples\TestFiles\Output. You will see three output PDF files (Fishermen.pdf, the_rime_of_the_ancient_mariner.pdf, and the factsheet_Arabic.pdf).

2. Open the PDF files to see the converted output. You have successfully run the OfficeToPDFTest conversion sample!

3. Close the output PDF files.

2. Create a new PDFNet C++ project

This section provides steps to create a simple C++ project that uses the Apryse SDK and the PDFNet library to programmatically generate a blank PDF document. With these steps, you can learn how to set up your environment, import the required libraries, and run a script that produces a valid PDF file—all without manual intervention. This example provides a practical foundation for more advanced document‑generation workflows.

1. Open Visual Studio.

2. Select Create a new project and select C++ Console App, then click Next.

3. In the Project name field, enter a name for your project. For this guide, we’ll name it ApryseGetStarted.

4. Under Location, enter the file location for your new project. For this guide, we’ll use C:\Users\YourName\source\repos.

5. Click Create and your new project opens.

Note the name and location of your new project – we will refer to it below in section 4. Run your project.

3. Initialize and integrate the Apryse Server SDK into your application

Before running the application, configure the following dependencies:

1. In the Visual Studio > Solution Explorer pane, right-click on the ApryseGetStarted project.

2. Select Properties and the Property Pages dialog opens.

3. At the top of the Property Pages dialog, under Configuration, select Debug and under Platform, select x64.

4. In the Configuration Properties pane, select Debugging. In the Working Directory field, enter: $(OutDir).

5. In the Configuration Properties pane, select C/C++ > General. In the Additional Include Directories field, enter: C:\Users\YourName\PDFNetC64\PDFNetC64\Headers and then click Apply.

6. In the Configuration Properties pane, select Linker > General. In the Additional Directories field, enter: C:\Users\YourName\PDFNetC64\PDFNetC64\Lib and then click Apply.

7. In the Configuration Properties pane, select Linker > Input. In the Additional Dependencies field, enter: PDFNetC.lib, click Apply and then click OK.

4. Run your project

This section helps you build a simple PDF-generation application.

1. In File Explorer, navigate to: C:\Users\YourName\PDFNetC64\PDFNetC64\Lib and copy the PDFNetC.dll file.

2. In File Explorer, navigate to your new project directory: C:\Users\YourName\source\repos\ApryseGetStarted\x64\Debug and paste the PDFNetC.dll file in this folder.

3. In Visual Studio, open ApryseGetStarted.cpp. Copy the following code and replace the default contents in the ApryseGetStarted.cpp file:

#include <iostream>

// Important for PDF related manipulations
#include <PDF/PDFNet.h>
#include <PDF/PDFDoc.h>

// Important for document filesystem interaction and more
#include <SDF/ObjSet.h>

using namespace pdftron;
using namespace PDF;
using namespace SDF;


int main()
{
    
    try
    {
        // This is required before any Apryse related
        // classes and methods can be properly used
        PDFNet::Initialize("YOUR_PDFTRON_LICENSE_KEY");

        PDFDoc doc;

        // Create a new page and push it into
        // the page sequence of the document.
        Page page = doc.PageCreate();
        doc.PagePushBack(page);

        // Save the document as a linearized PDF which is the most
        // popular and effective fast viewing format
        doc.Save("linearized_output.pdf", SDFDoc::e_linearized);
    }
    catch (pdftron::Common::Exception& ex)
    {
        std::cout << ex.GetMessage() << std::endl;
    }
    return 0;

    
}

1. Scroll down to the line containing PDFNet::Initialize(“YOUR_PDFTRON_LICENSE_KEY”); and replace the words in quotes with the copy of your trial license key. Save your changes and close the ApryseGetStarted.cpp file.

2. From the Main toolbar in Visual Studio, click on Build > Build Solution to compile the program. In the Output pane you will see Build: 1 succeeded.

3. Under the Main toolbar in Visual Studio, click on Debug > Start Without Debugging. The program runs and a command line window displays PDFNet is running in demo mode.

4. Press any key to close the command line window.

The sample code you just ran performs the following actions:

• Includes the required Apryse (PDFNet) header files.

• Initializes the PDFNet engine using the provided license key.

• Creates a new PDF document in memory.

• Adds a blank page to the document.

• Saves the document as a linearized PDF file.

• Terminates the PDFNet engine.

• Writes any runtime errors to the console.

1. In File Explorer, navigate to the project’s output directory where the PDF file has been saved (this is the location you specified in section 2. Create a new PDFNet C++ project, step 4 above: C:\Users\YourName\source\repos\ApryseGetStarted\x64\Debug).

2. Open the linearized_output.pdf which you created by integrating the Apryse Server SDK.

Now that you have successfully run the OfficeToPDFTest sample (in section 1) and integrated the Apryse Server SDK C++ PDF Library into your application, you can try out 50+ samples depending on your needs.

1. To try additional samples, go to section 1. Run a PDFNet sample project > step 2 above and choose another sample to run.

Troubleshooting

Older versions of Visual Studio Find out more about the Visual Studio versions we support.

Trouble setting dependencies Set dependencies for the Apryse SDK in a startup project with Visual Studio.

Linux

Linux C++ PDF Library Integration

This section helps you get started with one of our samples to see the output you can create when you integrate the Apryse Server SDK into your application. It also includes instructions on how to create a C++ project, then integrate Server SDK into the project. In the end, you’ll create and open a blank PDF within your project.

Prerequisites

Before you start:

• Install Visual Studio Code to write, build, test, and deploy your application.

• Install GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) to build and compile C++ into executable programs.

• Download Apryse’s C++ PDF Library for Linux file: Apryse Server SDK 64-bit or 64-bit ARM.

• Get your Apryse trial key.

Run Apryse SDK in production.

A commercial license key is required for use in a production environment. Contact sales by filling out our licensing form if you want to purchase a commercial license key.

Keep your commercial license key confidential.

License keys are uniquely generated and strictly confidential. Don't publish or store them in any public location, including public GitHub repositories.

1. Run a PDFNet sample project

In this section, you will download and run the OfficeToPDFTest PDFNet sample module, which demonstrates the SDK's document-conversion capabilities. Upon successful completion, you will have converted a DOCX document to a PDF file while leveraging the MS Office-to-PDF conversion API. You can use this module as a reference implementation when integrating similar document-conversion functionality into your own applications. By running the sample, you can quickly:

• Verify the capabilities.

• Understand how to interact with the MS Office to Conversion PDF API.

• Use it as a reference for integrating similar functionality into your own application.

1. Download the tarball file for Linux suitable for your processor. For this guide we’ll use the PDFNetC64.tar.gz file.

2. Navigate to the Downloads folder, right-click on the PDFNetC64.tar.gz file, then select Extract to...

3. Select Home, New Folder, and then enter ApryseSamples.

4. Click Create to create the new folder and then click Select to extract the tarball file into your new folder.

The ApryseSamples folder is created and the tarball is extracted to the folder.

You can install the samples to another location if you prefer, but for this guide’s instructions, we used the location and name above.

1. Navigate to: /Home/ApryseSamples/PDFNetC64/Samples/LicenseKey/CPP/LicenseKey.h and double-click to open so you can add your license key to the LicenseKey.h file before running the sample. (Note that the folder may be named CPP or CPPS, depending on your distribution.)

2. Scroll down to the line containing //#define LicenseKey “YOUR_PDF_LICENSE_KEY”. Uncomment this line (remove the // ) and replace the words in quotes with the copy of your trial license key you generated when you completed the Prerequisites instructions above. Do not change any other information in this file.

3. Save your changes and close the LicenseKey.h file.

4. To run the sample, navigate to: /Home/ApryseSamples/PDFNetC64/Samples/OfficeToPDFTest/CPP, right-click on the CPP folder, then select Open in Terminal (CPP or CPPS folder, depending on your distribution).

5. The Linux terminal opens the OfficeToPDFTest sample. From the project directory, in the terminal, enter the following, then press Enter:

Make

Then enter the following and press Enter:

./OfficeToPDFTest

1. When you run the ./OfficeToPDFTest command, the sample code loads an Office document, converts the Office document to PDF, saves the resulting PDF, and outputs status messages to the console. For more details, you can look at additional OfficeToPDF sample code and the Convert MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) to PDF overview.

Once the sample has finished running, you’ll see the status Done in the terminal.

1. In the terminal, type exit, then press Enter.

2. Navigate to: /Home/ApryseSamples/PDFNetC64/Samples/TestFiles/Output. You will see three output PDF files (Fishermen.pdf, the_rime_of_the_ancient_mariner.pdf, and the factsheet_Arabic.pdf).

3. Open the PDF files to see the converted output. You have successfully run the OfficeToPDFTest conversion sample.

4. Close the output PDF files.

2. Create a new PDFNet C++ project

This section provides steps to create a simple C++ project that you can, later, integrate with the Server SDK.

1. Open Visual Studio Code and select File > Open Folder.

2. Navigate to: /Home/ApryseSamples/PDFNetC64/Samples.

3. Click Create Folder, enter myApp, then click Create.

4. Open the myApp folder and create a CPP folder (or CPPS depending on your distribution). To exit out of the Open Folder dialog box select Cancel.

5. Go to the Main menu in Visual Studio Code and select File > New File...

6. In the New File... dialog box, enter myAPP.cpp and press Enter.

7. Navigate to: /ApryseSamples/PDFNetC64/Samples/myApp/CPP and click Create File. The myApp.cpp file is created.

Note the name and location of your new project – we will refer to it below in section 4. Run your project.

3. Initialize and integrate the Apryse Server SDK into your application

This section integrates the Apryse Server SDK and the PDFNet library to programmatically generate a blank PDF document. With these steps, you can learn how to set up your environment and import the required libraries.

1. In Visual Studio Code, copy the following code and paste it into the myApp.cpp file:

#include <iostream>
#include <PDF/PDFNet.h>
#include <PDF/PDFDoc.h>
#include <SDF/ObjSet.h>

using namespace pdftron;
using namespace PDF;
using namespace SDF;

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
 try
    {
    PDFNet::Initialize("YOUR_PDFTRON_LICENSE_KEY");  // PDFNet must be initialized before accessing any Apryse API. This line should only be called once in your main function.
    PDFDoc doc;
    Page page = doc.PageCreate(); // Start a new page
    doc.PagePushBack(page);       // Add the page to the document
    doc.Save("output.pdf", SDFDoc::e_linearized);  // Save the document as a linearized PDF
    std::cout << "Hello World!" << std::endl;
    }
   catch(pdftron::Common::Exception& ex)
    {
        std::cout << ex << std::endl;
    }
    return 0;
}

1. Scroll down to the line containing PDFNet::Initialize(“YOUR_PDFTRON_LICENSE_KEY”); and replace the words in quotes with the copy of your trial license key. Save your changes and close the file.

4. Run your project

You’ll run the project to get a blank PDF as your output.

1. Navigate to: /Home/ApryseSamples/PDFNetC64/Samples/myApp/CPP, right-click on the CPP folder and select Open in Terminal.

2. To build the project, enter the following and press Enter:

g++ myApp.cpp -I../../../Headers -L../../../Lib -lPDFNetC -lstdc++ -lpthread -lm -lc -Wl,-rpath,../../../Lib -Wl,-rpath$ORIGIN -o myApp

To run the application, enter the following and press Enter:

./myApp

You will see a message in the terminal:

PDFNet is running in demo mode.

PackageV2: base

Hello World!

The sample code you just ran performs the following actions:

• Includes the required Apryse (PDFNet) header files.

• Initializes the PDFNet SDK using the provided license key.

• Creates a new PDF document in memory.

• Adds a blank page to the document.

• Saves the document as a linearized PDF file.

• Terminates the PDFNet SDK.

• Outputs any runtime errors to the console.

1. Navigate to: /Home/ApryseSamples/PDFNetC64/Samples/myApp/CPP.

2. Open the output.pdf which you created by integrating the Apryse Server SDK.

Now that you have successfully run the OfficeToPDFTest sample (in section 1) and integrated the Apryse Server SDK C++ PDF Library into your application, you can try out 50+ samples depending on your needs.

1. To try additional samples, go to section 1. Run a PDFNet sample project > step 4 above and choose another sample to run.

macOS

macOS C++ PDF Library Integration

This section helps you get started with one of our samples to see the output you can create when you integrate the Apryse Server SDK into your application. It also includes instructions on how to create a C++ project, then integrate Server SDK into the project. In the end, you’ll create and open a blank PDF within your project.

Prerequisites

Before you start:

• Install Visual Studio Code to write, build, test, and deploy your application.

• Install GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) to build and compile C++ into executable programs.

• Download Apryse’s C++ PDF Library for macOS file: Apryse Server SDK 64-bit.

• Get your Apryse trial key.

Run Apryse SDK in production.

A commercial license key is required for use in a production environment. Contact sales by filling out our licensing form if you want to purchase a commercial license key.

Keep your commercial license key confidential.

License keys are uniquely generated and strictly confidential. Don't publish or store them in any public location, including public GitHub repositories.

1. Run a PDFNet sample project

In this section, you will download and run the OfficeToPDFTest PDFNet sample module, which demonstrates the SDK's document-conversion capabilities. Upon successful completion, you will have converted a DOCX document to a PDF file while leveraging the MS Office-to-PDF conversion API. You can use this module as a reference implementation when integrating similar document-conversion functionality into your own applications. By running the sample, you can quickly:

• Verify the capabilities.

• Understand how to interact with the MS Office to Conversion PDF API.

• Use it as a reference for integrating similar functionality into your own application.

1. Download the PDFNetCMac.zip file.

2. Double-click the PDFNetCMac.zip file to unzip it.

3. In your Documents folder, create a new ApryseSamples folder for the sample files.

You can install the samples to another location if you prefer, but for this guide’s instructions, we used the location and name above.

1. Move the unzipped PDFNetCMac folder to the new ApryseSamples folder.

2. In your terminal, go to the Documents/ApryseSamples directory and remove the quarantine attribute from all files so the sample can run:

cd Documents/ApryseSamples
sudo xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine .

Instead of using the terminal, go to System Settings > Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway. For more, see opening an app on a Mac.

1. Open the Documents/ApryseSamples/PDFNetCMac/Samples/LicenseKey/CPP/LicenseKey.h file in Visual Studio Code. (Note that the folder may be named CPP or CPPS, depending on your distribution.)

2. Scroll down to the line containing //#define LicenseKey “YOUR_PDF_LICENSE_KEY”. Uncomment this line (remove the // ) and replace the words in quotes with the copy of your trial license key you generated when you completed the Prerequisites instructions above. Do not change any other information in this file.

3. Save your changes and close the LicenseKey.h file.

4. To run the sample, navigate to: /Documents/ApryseSamples/PDFNetCMac/Samples/OfficeToPDFTest/CPP, right-click on the CPP folder, then select New Terminal at Folder (CPP or CPPS folder, depending on your distribution).

5. The terminal opens the OfficeToPDFTest sample. From the project directory, in the terminal, enter the following, then press Enter:

Make

Then enter the following and press Enter:

./OfficeToPDFTest

1. When you run the ./OfficeToPDFTest command, the sample code loads an Office document, converts the Office document to PDF, saves the resulting PDF, and outputs status messages to the console. For more details, you can look at additional OfficeToPDF sample code and the Convert MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) to PDF overview.

Once the sample has finished running, you’ll see the status Done in the terminal.

1. In the terminal, type exit, then press Enter.

2. Navigate to: /Documents/ApryseSamples/PDFNetCMac/Samples/TestFiles/Output. You will see three output PDF files (Fishermen.pdf, the_rime_of_the_ancient_mariner.pdf, and the factsheet_Arabic.pdf).

3. Open the PDF files to see the converted output. You have successfully run the OfficeToPDFTest conversion sample.

4. Close the output PDF files.

2. Create a new PDFNet C++ project

This section provides steps to create a simple C++ project that you can, later, integrate with the Server SDK.

1. Open Visual Studio Code and select File > Open Folder...

2. Navigate to: /Documents/ApryseSamples/PDFNetCMac/Samples.

3. Create a new folder named myApp.

4. Inside myApp, create a folder named CPP (or CPPS depending on your distribution).

5. Open the CPP folder.

6. Create a new file named myApp.cpp.

3. Initialize and integrate the Apryse Server SDK into your application

This section integrates the Apryse Server SDK and the PDFNet library to programmatically generate a blank PDF document. With these steps, you can learn how to set up your environment and import the required libraries.

1. In Visual Studio Code, copy the following code and paste it into the myApp.cpp file:

#include <iostream>
#include <PDF/PDFNet.h>
#include <PDF/PDFDoc.h>
#include <SDF/ObjSet.h> 

using namespace pdftron;
using namespace PDF;
using namespace SDF;

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
 try
    {
    PDFNet::Initialize("YOUR_PDFTRON_LICENSE_KEY");  // PDFNet must be initialized before accessing any Apryse API. This line should only be called once in your main function.
    PDFDoc doc;
    Page page = doc.PageCreate(); // Start a new page
    doc.PagePushBack(page);       // Add the page to the document
    doc.Save("output.pdf", SDFDoc::e_linearized);  // Save the document as a linearized PDF
    std::cout << "Hello World!" << std::endl;
    }
   catch(pdftron::Common::Exception& ex)
    {
        std::cout << ex << std::endl;
    }
    return 0;
}

1. Scroll down to the line containing PDFNet::Initialize(“YOUR_PDFTRON_LICENSE_KEY”); and replace the words in quotes with the copy of your trial license key. Save your changes and close the myApp.cpp file.

4. Run your project

You’ll run the project to get a blank PDF as your output.

1. Navigate to: /Documents/ApryseSamples/PDFNetCMac/Samples/myApp/CPP, right-click on the CPP folder and select NewTerminal at Folder.

2. To build the project, enter the following and press Enter:

g++ myApp.cpp -I../../../Headers -L../../../Lib -lPDFNetC -lstdc++ -lpthread -lm -lc -Wl,-rpath,../../../Lib -Wl,-rpath$ORIGIN -o myApp

To run the application, enter the following and press Enter:

./myApp

You will see a message in the terminal:

PDFNet is running in demo mode. 

PackageV2: base  

Hello World!

The sample code you just ran performs the following actions:

• Includes the required Apryse (PDFNet) header files.

• Initializes the PDFNet SDK using the provided license key.

• Creates a new PDF document in memory.

• Adds a blank page to the document.

• Saves the document as a linearized PDF file.

• Terminates the PDFNet SDK.

• Outputs any runtime errors to the console.

1. Navigate to: /Documents/ApryseSamples/PDFNetCMac/Samples/myApp/CPP.

2. Open the output.pdf which you created by integrating the Apryse Server SDK.

Now that you have successfully run the OfficeToPDFTest sample (in section 1) and integrated the Apryse Server SDK C++ PDF Library into your application, you can try out 50+ samples depending on your needs.

1. To try additional samples, go to section 1. Run a PDFNet sample project > step 3 above and choose another sample to run.

Next Steps

UsageGuidesSamplesAPI docs