The following benchmark results have been provided by a user at a major manufacturer (Thank you!).  The test application is a conversion program, equivalently written for each library, that reads in a 155-page (98304 bytes) file containing a parts list for a highly complex product, and generates a properly formatted version in PDF resulting in a 156-page file (including a cover page).  Each page contains mostly text, form lines and a corporate logo as an image.

The test results below show that ClibPDF is 3.5 to 5 times faster than other libraries.

"ClibPDF is the best one!  It converts the fastest AND produces the smallest output."

Test Platform: Sun Sparc 5 with 64MB memory.

*Linearization support refers to the ability to produce linearized PDF for byte-serving.

• ClibPDF library [v1.00] (write only) from FastIO Systems:
• Conversion time: 15 seconds.
• Resultant PDF size: 257,027 bytes.
• Compression: Flate compression.
• Bookmarking support: yes.
• Linearization support: no.
• Image support: JPEG (Premium package adds: TIFF and PDFIMG)

• PDFlib [v0.6] (write only) from Thomas Merz:
• Conversion time: 80 seconds.
• Resultant PDF size: 1,314,084 bytes.
• Compression: none supported yet.
• Bookmarking support: yes.
• Linearization support: no.
• Image support: JPEG and GIF.

• Adobe PDF Library (read/modify/write):
• Conversion time: 54 seconds.
• Resultant PDF size:  284,365 bytes.
• Compression: LZW compression.
• Bookmarking support: yes.
• Linearization support: yes.
• Image support: raw only.

• PostScript generator and Adobe Acrobat Distiller:
• Requires two step conversion:
•  PostScript conversion time: 7 seconds.
•  Distiller conversion time:  3 minutes 14 seconds.
• Resultant PDF size: 197,548 bytes.
• Compression: LZW compression.
• Bookmarking support: yes.
• Linearization support: no.
• Image support: everything in Postscript.

ClibPDF has also been used successfully to convert a massive parts list file (originally 7.2MB) into a 9255-page PDF file (15.2MB).