pdfplumber-rs 0.2.0

High-performance PDF text, table, and geometry extraction — Rust-powered Python bindings for pdfplumber-rs

pdfplumber-rs

High-performance PDF text, table, and geometry extraction for Python — powered by Rust.

pdfplumber-rs is a Rust-native reimplementation of pdfplumber exposed to Python via PyO3. It provides a familiar API while delivering significantly faster extraction speeds.

Installation

pip install pdfplumber-rs

Quick Start

import pdfplumber

# Open a PDF
pdf = pdfplumber.PDF.open("document.pdf")

# Access pages
for page in pdf.pages:
    # Extract text
    text = page.extract_text()
    print(text)

    # Extract words with bounding boxes
    words = page.extract_words()
    for w in words:
        print(f"{w['text']} at ({w['x0']}, {w['top']}, {w['x1']}, {w['bottom']})")

    # Extract tables
    tables = page.find_tables()
    for table in tables:
        rows = table.extract()
        for row in rows:
            print(row)

# Open from bytes
with open("document.pdf", "rb") as f:
    pdf = pdfplumber.PDF.open_bytes(f.read())

API Reference

PDF

Method / Property	Description
PDF.open(path)	Open a PDF file from a path
PDF.open_bytes(data)	Open a PDF from bytes
.pages	List of Page objects
.metadata	Document metadata dict (title, author, etc.)
.bookmarks()	Table of contents / outline entries

Page

Method / Property	Description
.page_number	0-based page index
.width / .height	Page dimensions in points
.extract_text(layout=False)	Extract all text
.extract_words(x_tolerance=3.0, y_tolerance=3.0)	Extract words with bounding boxes
.chars()	Character-level data with font info
.find_tables()	Detect tables, returns Table objects
.extract_tables()	Extract all table content
.lines() / .rects() / .curves() / .images()	Geometric objects
.crop(bbox)	Crop to region (x0, top, x1, bottom)
.within_bbox(bbox) / .outside_bbox(bbox)	Spatial filtering
.search(pattern, regex=True, case=True)	Search for text

Table

Method / Property	Description
.bbox	Bounding box as (x0, top, x1, bottom)
.rows	Cell data organized by row
.accuracy	Fraction of non-empty cells
.extract()	Table content as list[list[str | None]]

CroppedPage

Supports the same content methods as Page: chars(), extract_text(), extract_words(), find_tables(), extract_tables(), lines(), rects(), curves(), images(), plus further crop(), within_bbox(), outside_bbox().

Comparison with Python pdfplumber

Feature	pdfplumber (Python)	pdfplumber-rs
Language	Pure Python	Rust + PyO3
Text extraction	Yes	Yes
Table detection	Yes	Yes
Word extraction	Yes	Yes
Geometry (lines, rects, curves)	Yes	Yes
Spatial filtering (crop, within_bbox)	Yes	Yes
Text search	Yes	Yes
Type stubs	No	Yes (.pyi)

Performance

pdfplumber-rs benefits from Rust's zero-cost abstractions and compiled performance:

• Text extraction: Typically 5-20x faster than Python pdfplumber
• Table detection: Typically 3-10x faster for lattice-based tables
• Memory usage: Lower memory footprint due to Rust's ownership model

Actual speedups depend on document complexity and system configuration.

License

Dual-licensed under MIT or Apache 2.0 at your option.