Maintained alternatives to PyPDF2

Question:

I’m using the PyPDF2 library for extracting text, images, page width and heights, annotations, and other attributes from pdf documents. However, the library has many bugs and issues and seems not to be maintained for a long time already. (edit: PyPDF2 is maintained again)

Is there a more vivid fork that is being maintained and developed?
Is there a good alternative?

From what I know, reportlab is more suitable for creating brand new pdf’s (or maybe I’m just not experienced enough with reportlab).

Asked By: Peter Franek

Source

Answers:

PyMuPDF is a Python binding for MuPDF – a lightweight PDF and XPS viewer. Because MuPDF supports not only PDF but also XPS, OpenXPS, CBZ, CBR, FB2, and EPUB formats, so does PyMuPDF. PyMuPDF is hosted on GitHub. We also are registered on PyPI.

Its performance stats are also very promising. Following are three sections that deal with different aspects of performance:

document parsing
text extraction
image rendering

PyMuPDF is the faster than pdfrw, PyPDF2, and pdftk.

Answered By: Vishal Singh

Update: pypdf (pypi) is maintained again – and I am the maintainer (of pypdf and PyPDF2) 🙂 I’ve just released a new version with several bugfixes.

Looking at the top PyPI packages, PyPDF2 is also the most used one (and pypdf==3.1.0 is almost the same as PyPDF2==3.0.0, the community just needs a bit of time to switch to pypdf)

Three potential alternatives which are maintained (just like pypdf):

pymupdf: uses mupdf (only for open source due to mypdf license)
pikepdf: Uses qpdf
pdfminer.six: A pure Python project.

I would not use:

PyPDF2: I am the maintainer. In December 2022, I made the last release. I want the community to switch to pypdf (where I’m also the maintainer)
PyPDF3 (pypi): Has less activity and probably less features than PyPDF2.
PyPDF4 (pypi): Last release on PyPI in 2018

Answered By: Martin Thoma