lopdf vs pdfium in Rust — Why I Chose the Smaller One

All tests run on an 8-year-old MacBook Air. When I started building a PDF tool in Rust, the first decision was which PDF library to use. The two main options: lopdf and pdfium-render . I chose lopdf. Here's why — and where it hurts. The options pdfium-render Bindings to Google's PDFium (the engine inside Chrome) Excellent rendering quality Large binary (~10MB added to app size) Requires bundling the PDFium shared library Great for viewing, not great for manipulation lopdf Pure Rust PDF manipulat