pypdfium2 0.15.0

Python bindings to PDFium

PyPDFium2

PyPDFium2 is a Python 3 binding to PDFium, the liberal-licensed PDF rendering library authored by Foxit and maintained by Google.

Install/Update

Install from PyPI

pip3 install -U pypdfium2

Manual installation

The following steps require the system tools git and gcc to be installed and available in PATH. In addition, the Python dependencies setuptools, setuptools-scm wheel, build, and ctypesgen are needed. Also make sure that your pip version is up-to-date. For more information, please refer to dependencies.md.

Package locally

To get pre-compiled binaries, generate bindings and install PyPDFium2, you may run

make install

in the directory you downloaded the repository to. This will resort to building PDFium if no pre-compiled binaries are available for your platform.

Source build

If you wish to perform a source build regardless of whether PDFium binaries are available or not, you can do the following:

make build

In case building failed, you could try

python3 platform_setup/build_pdfium.py --nativebuild --check-deps
PYP_TARGET_PLATFORM="sourcebuild" python3 -m pip install . -v --no-build-isolation

to prefer the use of system-provided build tools over the toolchain PDFium ships with. The problem is that the toolchain is limited to a curated set of platforms, as PDFium target cross-compilation for "non-standard" architectures. (Make sure you installed all packages from the Native Build section of dependencies.md, in addition to the default requirements.)

Examples

Using the command-line interface

Rasterise a PDF document:

pypdfium2 render document.pdf -o output_dir/ --scale 3

You may also rasterise multiple files at once:

pypdfium2 render doc_1.pdf doc_2.pdf doc_3.pdf -o output_dir/

Show the table of contents for a PDF:

pypdfium2 toc document.pdf

To obtain a list of subcommands, run pypdfium2 help. Individual help for each subcommand is available can be accessed in the same way (pypdfium any_subcommand help)

CLI documentation: https://pypdfium2.readthedocs.io/en/stable/shell_api.html

Using the support model

Import pypdfium2:

import pypdfium2 as pdfium

Open a PDF using the helper class PdfDocument:

doc = pdfium.PdfDocument(filename)
# ... use methods provided by the helper class
pdf = doc.raw
# ... work with the actual PDFium document handle
doc.close()

Open a PDF using the context manager PdfContext:

with pdfium.PdfContext(filename) as pdf:
    # ... work with the pdf

Open a PDF using the function open_pdf_auto():

pdf, loader_data = pdfium.open_pdf_auto(filename)
# ... work with the pdf
pdfium.close_pdf(pdf, loader_data)

Render a single page:

with pdfium.PdfContext(filename) as pdf:
    pil_image = pdfium.render_page(
        pdf,
        page_index = 0,
        scale = 1,
        rotation = 0,
        colour = 0xFFFFFFFF,
        annotations = True,
        greyscale = False,
        optimise_mode = pdfium.OptimiseMode.none,
    )

pil_image.save("out.png")
pil_image.close()

Render multiple pages concurrently:

for image, suffix in pdfium.render_pdf(filename):
    image.save(f'out_{suffix}.png')
    image.close()

Read the table of contents:

doc = pdfium.PdfDocument(filepath)
for item in doc.get_toc():
    print(
        '    ' * item.level +
        "{} -> {}  # {} {}".format(
            item.title,
            item.page_index + 1,
            item.view_mode,
            item.view_pos,
        )
    )
doc.close()

Support model documentation: https://pypdfium2.readthedocs.io/en/stable/python_api.html

Using the PDFium API

Rendering the first page of a PDF document:

import math
import ctypes
from PIL import Image
import pypdfium2 as pdfium

filename = "your/path/to/document.pdf"

doc = pdfium.FPDF_LoadDocument(filename, None)
page_count = pdfium.FPDF_GetPageCount(doc)
assert page_count >= 1

form_config = pdfium.FPDF_FORMFILLINFO(2)
form_fill = pdfium.FPDFDOC_InitFormFillEnvironment(doc, form_config)

page = pdfium.FPDF_LoadPage(doc, 0)
width = math.ceil(pdfium.FPDF_GetPageWidthF(page))
height = math.ceil(pdfium.FPDF_GetPageHeightF(page))

bitmap = pdfium.FPDFBitmap_Create(width, height, 0)
pdfium.FPDFBitmap_FillRect(bitmap, 0, 0, width, height, 0xFFFFFFFF)

render_args = [bitmap, page, 0, 0, width, height, 0,  pdfium.FPDF_LCD_TEXT | pdfium.FPDF_ANNOT]
pdfium.FPDF_RenderPageBitmap(*render_args)
pdfium.FPDF_FFLDraw(form_fill, *render_args)

cbuffer = pdfium.FPDFBitmap_GetBuffer(bitmap)
buffer = ctypes.cast(cbuffer, ctypes.POINTER(ctypes.c_ubyte * (width * height * 4)))

img = Image.frombuffer("RGBA", (width, height), buffer.contents, "raw", "BGRA", 0, 1)
img.save("out.png")

pdfium.FPDFBitmap_Destroy(bitmap)
pdfium.FPDF_ClosePage(page)

pdfium.FPDFDOC_ExitFormFillEnvironment(form_fill)
pdfium.FPDF_CloseDocument(doc)

For more examples of using the raw API, take a look at the support model source code and the examples directory.

Documentation for the PDFium API is available. PyPDFium2 transparently maps all PDFium classes, enums and functions to Python. However, there can sometimes be minor differences between Foxit and open-source PDFium. In case of doubt, take a look at the inline source code documentation of PDFium.

Licensing

PDFium and PyPDFium2 are available by the terms and conditions of either Apache 2.0 or BSD-3-Clause, at your choice.

Various other open-source licenses apply to the dependencies of PDFium. License texts for PDFium and its dependencies are included in the file LICENSE-PDFium.txt, which is also shipped with binary redistributions.

Documentation and examples of PyPDFium2 are CC-BY-4.0 licensed.

Development

PDFium builds are retrieved from bblanchon/pdfium-binaries. Python bindings are auto-generated with ctypesgen

Please see #3 for a list of platforms where binary wheels are available. Some wheels are not tested, unfortunately. If you have access to a theoretically supported but untested system, please report success or failure on the issue or discussion panel.

(In case bblanchon/pdfium-binaries adds support for more architectures, PyPDFium2 can be adapted easily.)

For wheel naming conventions, please see Python Packaging: Platform compatibility tags and the various referenced PEPs. This thread may also provide helpful information.

PyPDFium2 contains scripts to automate the release process:

• To build the wheels, run make release. This will download binaries and header files, write finished Python binary distributions to dist/, and run some checks.
• To clean up after a release, run make clean. This will remove downloaded files and build artifacts.

Testing

Run make test.

Publishing the wheels

• You may want to upload to TestPyPI first to ensure everything works as expected:

  twine upload --verbose --repository-url https://test.pypi.org/legacy/ dist/*
  

• If all went well, upload to the real PyPI:

  twine upload dist/*
  

Issues

Since PyPDFium2 is built using upstream binaries and an automatic bindings creator, issues that are not related to packaging or support model code probably need to be addressed upstream. However, the PyPDFium2 issues panel is always a good place to start if you have any problems, questions or suggestions.

If the cause of an issue could be determined to be in PDFium, the problem needs to be reported at the PDFium bug tracker.

Issues related to pre-compiled binaries should be discussed at pdfium-binaries, though.

If your issue is caused by the bindings generator, refer to the ctypesgen bug tracker.

Known limitations

Incompatibility with CPython 3.7.6 and 3.8.1

PyPDFium2 cannot be used with releases 3.7.6 and 3.8.1 of the CPython interpreter due to a regression that broke ctypesgen-created string handling code.

Non-ascii file paths on Windows

On Windows, the FPDF_LoadDocument() function of PDFium used not to be able to open documents with file paths containing multi-byte, non-ascii characters (see Bug 682). A patch has been merged that is supposed to fix the issue, but it is not sufficiently tested yet.

The support model of PyPDFium2 implements a workaround using FPDF_LoadCustomDocument() to be able to process non-ascii filepaths on Windows anyway.

Thanks

Patches to PDFium and DepotTools originate from the pdfium-binaries repository. Many thanks to @bblanchon and @BoLaMN.

History

PyPDFium2 is the successor of pypdfium and pypdfium-reboot.

The initial pypdfium was packaged manually and did not get regular updates. There were no platform-specific wheels, but only a single wheel that contained binaries for 64-bit Linux, Windows and macOS.

pypdfium-reboot then added a script to automate binary deployment and bindings generation to simplify regular updates. However, it was still not platform specific.

PyPDFium2 is a full rewrite of pypdfium-reboot to build platform-specific wheels. It also adds a basic support model and a command-line interface on top of the PDFium C API to simplify common use cases. Moreover, PyPDFium2 includes facilities to build PDFium from source, to extend platform compatibility.