Render a PDF to an image in .NET — with a pure-C# PDF engine

Most PDF libraries in .NET are wrappers. PDFium, MuPDF, Ghostscript — solid engines, but they ship native binaries you P/Invoke into. That buys you per-RID packages, Native AOT friction, the "works on my box, throws DllNotFoundException in the Alpine container" dance, and a deployment story that's never quite boring.

PdfLibrary takes the other road: the PDF engine and every image codec are pure managed C#. No vendored native PDF library, no native image decoders. I'll be precise about the one native piece (SkiaSharp, for rasterization) further down — because a "no native dependencies" claim that quietly ignores SkiaSharp would be a lie, and you'd find out the first time you deployed.

Here's the part you came for — rendering the first page of a PDF to a PNG:

using PdfLibrary.Structure;

using PdfLibrary.Rendering.SkiaSharp;