PDFFile

November 23, 2025 · View on GitHub

A ZipFile like API for PDFs using PyMuPDF as a backend.

📜 News

PDFFile has a NEWS file to summarize changes that affect users.

The pymupdf dependency usually has wheels that install a local version of libmupdf. But for some platforms (e.g. Windows) it may require libstdc++ and c/c++ build tools installed to compile a libmupdf. More detail on this is available in the pymupdf docs.

🧶 Data Types

MuPDF reads and writes all data types as strings. PDFFile automatically converts pdf date strings to python datetimes and pdf/xml boolean strings to python bools and back.

The helper functions to_datetime, to_pdf_date, to_bool, and to_xml_bool are available on the PDFFile class.

Installing on Linux on ARM (AARCH64) with Python 3.13

Pymupdf has no pre-built wheels for AARCH64 so pip must build it and the build fails on Python 3.13 without this environment variable set:

PYMUPDF_SETUP_PY_LIMITED_API=0 pip install comicbox-pdffile

You will also have to have the build-essential and python3-dev or equivalent packages installed on on your Linux.

🛠️ API

Attached to these docs in the navigation header there are some auto generated API docs that might be better than nothing. But the code is really small and shouldn't be difficult to interpret.

🛠 Development

PDFfile code is hosted at Github