Contributing guidelines

December 29, 2025 ยท View on GitHub

Any contribution is appreciated! You might want to:

  • Fix spelling errors
  • Improve documentation
  • Add tests for untested code
  • Add new features
  • Fix bugs

How can I contribute?

  • Use issues to report bugs and features
    • If you report a bug in the results for a particular pdf, include that pdf. This allows others to replicate the issue.
  • Fix issues by creating pull requests.
  • Help others by sharing your thoughts in comments on issues and pull requests.
  • Join the chat on gitter

Guideline for creating issues

  • Search previous issues, as yours might be a duplicate.
  • When creating a new issue for a bug, include a minimal reproducible example.
  • When creating a new issue for a feature, be sure to describe the context of the problem you are trying to solve. This will help others to see the importance of your feature request.

Guideline for creating pull request

  • A pull request should close an existing issue. For example, use "Fix #123" to indicate that your PR fixes issue 123.
  • Pull requests should be merged to master.
  • Include unit tests when possible. In case of bugs, this will help to prevent the same mistake in the future. In case of features, this will show that your code works correctly.
  • Code should work for Python 3.10+.
  • Test your code by running make check (see below).
  • New features should be well documented using docstrings.
  • Check if the README.md or readthedocs documentation needs to be updated.
  • Check spelling and grammar.
  • Don't forget to update the CHANGELOG.md.

Guideline for posting comments

Guidelines for publishing

  • Publishing is automated. Add a YYYYMMDD version tag and GitHub workflows will do the rest.

Guideline for dependencies

  • This package is distributed under the MIT license.
  • All dependencies should be compatible with this license.
  • Use licensecheck to validate if new packages are compatible.

Getting started

This project uses uv for dependency management and development workflows.

  1. Clone the repository

    git clone https://github.com/pdfminer/pdfminer.six
cd pdfminer.six

  2. Install uv

    Follow the installation instructions at https://docs.astral.sh/uv/getting-started/installation/

    Quick install:

    # On macOS and Linux
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

# On Windows
powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"

  3. Install dev dependencies

    make install

    This runs uv sync to install all dependencies in an isolated virtual environment.

  4. Install pre-commit hooks (recommended)

    uv run pre-commit install

    This will automatically run formatting and linting checks before each commit.

  5. Run all checks before committing

    make check

    This runs formatting, linting with auto-fixes, type checking, and tests.

    For individual commands, run make help to see all available targets.