pdf-rs

pdf-rs is a Rust PDF parser with Python bindings. It focuses on fast structural inspection, text extraction, Markdown output, image/font metadata, incremental metadata and annotation updates, and LLM-friendly page chunks with OCR handoff requests.

Features

• Parse classic xref tables, xref streams, and compressed object streams.
• Decode common stream filters including Flate, ASCIIHex, ASCII85, RunLength, and PNG predictors.
• Extract document metadata, page text, outlines, names, page labels, links, annotations, forms, embedded files, fonts, and image XObjects.
• Export Markdown and page chunks for RAG/LLM ingestion.
• Produce OCR request placeholders for scanned pages or image regions so an external OCR engine can be plugged in without coupling the parser to one OCR backend.
• Provide Python bindings through maturin / PyO3.

Rust Usage

use pdf_rs::{Document, LlmParseOptions};

let document = Document::parse_file("paper.pdf")?;
println!("{}", document.text()?);

let llm = document.to_llm_document_with_options(LlmParseOptions::default())?;
for page in llm.pages {
    println!("page {}: {}", page.page_number, page.text);
}
# Ok::<(), pdf_rs::PdfError>(())

Python Usage

import pdf_rs

doc = pdf_rs.Document.open_mmap("paper.pdf")
print(doc.to_markdown())

for chunk in doc.llm_chunks():
    print(chunk["page_number"], chunk["text"])

for request in doc.ocr_requests(ocr="auto"):
    print(request)

CLI

cargo run --bin pdf-rs-cli -- paper.pdf --mmap --summary
cargo run --bin pdf-rs-cli -- paper.pdf --text
cargo run --bin pdf-rs-cli -- paper.pdf --ocr-requests

Local Checks

cargo fmt --check
cargo test
cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo check --features mimalloc
cargo clippy --features python --all-targets -- -D warnings
uvx maturin build --features python --out target\wheels

To run the Python smoke test after building a wheel:

uv venv target\py-smoke --seed
uv pip install --python target\py-smoke\Scripts\python.exe --force-reinstall target\wheels\pdf_rs-*.whl
target\py-smoke\Scripts\python.exe tests\python_api.py

Release

GitHub Actions builds wheels on Linux, Windows, and macOS when a v*.*.* tag is pushed. The release workflow uploads distributions to PyPI using the PYPI_API_TOKEN repository secret and creates a GitHub release from the same artifacts.

git tag v0.1.0
git push origin v0.1.0