ROADMAP.md

🗺️ Project Roadmap

This document outlines the future direction of PDFLib. We follow Semantic Versioning.

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✅ Completed (v3.1 Stable)

The v3.1 release (current stable) introduced advanced stateful operations, security, and major integrations.

• Stateful Chaining: rotate()->watermark()->save() pipeline.
• Laravel Wrapper: Official PDFServiceProvider and PDF Facade.
• Digital Signature Validation: Verify X.509 signatures (validate()).
• OCR Support: Extract text via Tesseract (ocr()).
• Redaction: Coordinate-based text blackout (redact()).
• Metadata: Read/Write PDF metadata (getMetadata()).
• Core Architecture: DriverInterface with Ghostscript, OpenSSL, PDFtk, Chrome, Tesseract drivers.

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🔮 Upcoming (v4.0)

Theme: Cloud & Enterprise Scalability

The next major version will focus on running PDFLib in serverless and distributed environments.

1. Cloud Drivers (AWS/S3)

• Implement S3Driver to handle input/output directly from AWS S3 streams without local temp files if possible (using stream wrappers).
• Support for AWS Lambda execution (Serverless PDF manipulation).

2. Asynchronous Processing

• Integrate with Laravel Queues for background processing of heavy tasks (OCR, Compression).
• Webhook callbacks for long-running jobs.

3. Advanced Editing (FPDI Integration)

• Deep integration with FPDI to allow:
  • Template importing (Letterheads).
  • Page rearrangement/deletion within PHP (no external binary needed).
  • Advanced text overlay with native font embedding.

4. HTML Generation Improvements

• Integration with spatie/browsershot (Puppeteer) as a robust alternative to ChromeHeadlessDriver.
• Support for complex CSS Paged Media features.

5. Containerization

• Official Docker Image imalh/pdflib pre-installed with gs, pdftk, tesseract, poppler-utils, chrome.

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