10,797 stars · AGPL-3.0 (plus a commercial licence sold separately by Artifex) · 1.28.2 (2026-08-06), confirmed by the PyPI RSS release feed · Track this in Scout
Reads, edits and renders PDFs from Python on the MuPDF engine, with text coordinates and page images that the permissive alternatives cannot produce.
▶Repo detailsspecs
- py-pdf/pypdf
Pure Python with nothing compiled, so it installs anywhere without a compiler and carries a permissive BSD licence, but it is much slower on large files and cannot render a page to an image.
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pikepdf/pikepdfEdition 35 covered this: also fast and also built on a C++ engine, with an MPL-2.0 licence that has no commercial condition, but it does not render pages and does not extract reading order.
Track this in Scout- pdfminer/pdfminer.six
A community fork focused narrowly on getting text and its layout out of a PDF, with an MIT licence and no editing, drawing or rendering at all.
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