Introduction, Installation, and Usage of PyMuPDF (Python Bindings for MuPDF)

PyMuPDF is the Python interface to the MuPDF library, a lightweight PDF, XPS, and e‑book viewer that supports many document formats and offers high‑quality rendering, annotation, and conversion capabilities.

Key features include decryption, metadata access, page rendering to raster (PNG) or vector (SVG), text search, extraction in various formats (text, html, json, xml), and full PDF manipulation such as creating, merging, splitting, inserting, deleting, and re‑ordering pages.

Installation : install via PyPI with pip install PyMuPDF . Wheels are available for Windows, Linux, macOS, and many‑linux aarch64; the package has no mandatory external dependencies, though optional packages like Pillow , fontTools , and pymupdf-fonts enhance functionality.

Import and naming : the library is imported as import fitz (historically named after the "Fitz" rendering engine derived from MuPDF).

Basic usage :

<code>import fitz
print(fitz.__doc__)  # shows version information

doc = fitz.open('sample.pdf')  # open a document
page = doc.load_page(0)      # load first page (or doc[0])

# Get page count and metadata
print(doc.page_count)
print(doc.metadata)

# Render page to PNG
pix = page.get_pixmap()
pix.save('page-0.png')

# Extract text in different formats
text = page.get_text('text')
html = page.get_text('html')
json_data = page.get_text('json')

# Search for a string
areas = page.search_for('mupdf')

# Modify PDF: insert, delete, move pages
doc.insert_page(-1, width=595, height=842)  # add blank page at end
doc.delete_page(2)                         # delete third page

doc.save('output.pdf', incremental=True)

doc.close()
</code>

Additional utilities include doc.get_toc() for table‑of‑contents extraction, page.get_links() for hyperlink retrieval, and page.annots() or page.widgets() for annotation and form field handling.

PDF‑specific operations such as Document.insert_pdf() allow merging documents, while Document.select() and page slicing enable creating new PDFs from selected pages. Saving can be incremental to preserve original file structure.