PDF Tools Docker (Free vs Paid Comparison)

Managing and processing PDF files requires special tools like merge, split, compress, convert, and OCR. Deploying PDF tools using Docker containers enhances scalability, portability, and easy management of common files without the need for external scripts or optional login. The Dockerized PDF tools run in isolated environments, ensuring consistent performance across different systems free from dependency conflicts.

In this regard, users can interact with web interfaces or APIs to make automation and integrating individual files into larger workflows easy. Key open-source tools that can be deployed with Docker include Stirling-PDF, PDFTK, Ghostscript, docker-pdf-tools, and IronSecureDoc for rich and fast document processing. Containerizing this will help businesses streamline their management of documents while achieving reliability in cloud and on-premises environments.

Stirling-PDF

Open-source Stirling-PDF is the Docker version for users to work with comprehensive manipulations of PDF pages, including but not limited to merging, splitting, compressing, converting, or adding OCR capabilities. Running it in a Docker container makes the application deployable in diverse environments quickly, free from dependency conflicts. The tool has an integrated web-based UI and API for efficient interaction. Deployed, the Docker engine ensures resource isolation, making the application scalable and lightweight.

Volumes can be mounted to the server memory to persistently store the processed PDFs, and environment variables can be configured for customization. Docker offers advantages such as automatic document workflows, cloud-based processing of split PDFs, converting HTML into PDF, and secure, on-premises deployment with ease and flexibility in document management tasks.

PDFTK Docker

The PDFTK Docker is a containerized version of the PDFTK command-line tool for manipulating and processing PDF files. The tool provides various features for editing metadata and modifying PDFs, including merging and splitting, rotation, encryption and decryption, and watermarking. Running within a Docker container ensures that the tool works consistently and isolates itself from any dependency issues, allowing it to be easily deployed across different platforms.

With PDFTK Docker, the user can run PDF operations from the command line in the container, which might be part of an automated workflow or a larger document processing system. Thus, this container-based setup, with its scalability, portability, and ease of use, can easily be used within local development and also when deployed in a cloud-based system. The usual usage involves mounting input and output file volumes and then running commands through the Docker CLI or using an API wrapper.

Ghostscript Docker

Ghostscript Docker is a containerized version of the powerful command-line tool Ghostscript, used for processing, conversion, and manipulation of full-format PDFs and PostScript files. Ghostscript is used in the compression of PDFs, rasterization, format conversion (like PDF to PNG, PS to PDF), merging, removing blank pages, and text extraction. Running Ghostscript on a Docker container ensures operation in a lightweight, portable, and consistent environment that is free from dependency conflicts.

With Ghostscript Docker, users can execute PDF-related operations inside a container by providing volumes for I/O files along with running commands for Ghostscript using the CLI or API through Docker. This configuration best suits automated document workflows, cloud PDF processing, or large-scale batch operations. Additionally, containerized Ghostscript enhances scalability while improving security and simplifying deployment as part of servers or microservice architectures.

docker-pdf-tools

docker-pdf-tools is a Docker-based container that packages open-source PDF processing utilities into one environment for efficiently performing various manipulations on PDF files such as adding physically scanned page dividers. Included are Ghostscript, PDFTK, Poppler (pdftohtml, pdftotext), and ImageMagick, enabling functionalities like merging, splitting, extracting images, compressing, converting PDF, watermarking, and including OCR in PDF files.

This allows users to run docker-pdf-tools for any PDF operation without installing multiple dependencies on a local system. It is containerized, meaning it's portable, consistent, and easy to deploy in all environments, even in cloud environments and CI/CD pipelines. All interactions with the container occur through commands or scripts, which are well-suited to automated document workflows and batch processing.

IronSecureDoc Docker

IronSecureDoc Docker is an enterprise-grade secure containerized solution for PDF document management. A product developed on the IronPDF platform, IronSecureDoc allows users to access maximum security features with AES 256 encryption, digital signatures, and password protection of documents, along with compliance-ready protection to process very sensitive and confidential files in a safe environment. It is also scalable, enabling strong API integrations and providing professional support with easy deployment to businesses seeking reliable, high-performance PDF processing within containerized setups.

IronPDF facilitates creating a PDF from any other form of data input or adding and editing information through text, images, or metadata. It integrates functionality for merging multiple PDFs, composing multiple files, adding images together, splitting documents, and even adding comments, highlights, or watermarks for annotations.

Docker Installation

Docker Compose is included in Docker Desktop for Windows. If you ever had Docker Desktop installed in the past, Docker Compose should be installed on your computer, and you are all set to continue straight away. If you don't have Docker Desktop installed, here's how to install it.

Set up Docker Desktop

• Download Docker Desktop from the official website.
• Proceed through all setup instructions of the installer.
• Ensure that WSL 2 is turned ON for better performance on Windows.
• Restart the computer after installation.

Docker Compose will be available once Docker Desktop is installed. You can confirm this by using the following command:

docker-compose --version

docker-compose --version

Install and Run IronSecureDoc

Use the command below in Command Prompt or an opened terminal window to pull the Docker image for IronSecureDoc from the repository.

docker pull ironsoftwareofficial/ironsecuredoc

docker pull ironsoftwareofficial/ironsecuredoc

The command above downloads the latest IronSecureDoc Docker image.

docker container run --rm -p 8080:8080 -e ENVIRONMENT=Development -e HTTP_PORTS=8080 ironsoftwareofficial/ironsecuredoc:latest

docker container run --rm -p 8080:8080 -e ENVIRONMENT=Development -e HTTP_PORTS=8080 ironsoftwareofficial/ironsecuredoc:latest

This Docker command releases a container containing IronSoftware's IronSecureDoc. The --rm flag automatically removes the container after it stops. The -p 8080:8080 option maps port 8080 on the host to port 8080 in the container, making the application available at http://localhost:8080.

Sample Code To Add Password on PDF Document

IronSecureDoc REST API is a web-based interface that allows developers to access the capabilities and features of the document management program to process PDFs safely. The technology stack-agnostic API allows simple, standard integration of IronSecureDoc features in applications, following RESTful principles.

To request a permissions password with the IronSecureDoc API, you can make a POST request to encrypt a document with a user password using the command below:

curl -X 'POST' \
  'http://localhost:8080/v1/document-services/pdfs/encrypt?user_password=demo' \
  -H 'accept: */*' \
  -H 'Content-Type: multipart/form-data' \
  -F 'pdf_file=@test.pdf;type=application/pdf'

curl -X 'POST' \
  'http://localhost:8080/v1/document-services/pdfs/encrypt?user_password=demo' \
  -H 'accept: */*' \
  -H 'Content-Type: multipart/form-data' \
  -F 'pdf_file=@test.pdf;type=application/pdf'

The command uploads the file for export to the output document, downloads the file from the output document, and then saves it securely.

Conclusion

PDF tools, through Dockerization, have transformed document processing by making it scalable, portable, and automate workflows. Features from Stirling-PDF, PDFTK, Ghostscript, and docker-pdf-tools enable users to perform tasks like merging, splitting, compressing, and applying OCR while ensuring security, reliability, and enterprise-grade document processing in IronSecureDoc.

IronSecureDoc provides high-level encryption, digital signing, access control, and authentication support for seamless integration into secure environments, making it ideal for businesses seeking high levels of document security and compliance. Its Docker-based deployment ensures consistency, efficiency, and safety while processing documents.

IronSecureDoc has become the ultimate solution for organizations focused on data protection and reliability. License information for IronSecureDoc can be found on the licensing page. Detailed configurations about the products of Iron Software are listed on the library suite page.