Maintained alternatives to PyPDF2

Question

I'm using the PyPDF2 library for extracting text, images, page width and heights, annotations, and other attributes from pdf documents. However, the library has many bugs and issues and seems not to be maintained for a long time already. (edit: PyPDF2 is maintained again)

• Is there a more vivid fork that is being maintained and developed?
• Is there a good alternative?

From what I know, reportlab is more suitable for creating brand new pdf's (or maybe I'm just not experienced enough with reportlab).

Answer 1

Update: PyPDF2 is maintained again - and I am the maintainer :-) I've just released a new version with several bugfixes.

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Three potential alternatives which are maintained (just like PyPDF2):

• pymupdf: uses mupdf (only for open source due to mypdf license)
• pikepdf: Uses qpdf
• pdfminer.six: A pure Python project.

I would not use:

• PyPDF3 (pypi): Has less activity and probably less features than PyPDF2.
• PyPDF4 (pypi): Last release on PyPI in 2018

Answer 2

PyMuPDF is a Python binding for MuPDF – a lightweight PDF and XPS viewer. Because MuPDF supports not only PDF but also XPS, OpenXPS, CBZ, CBR, FB2, and EPUB formats, so does PyMuPDF. PyMuPDF is hosted on GitHub. We also are registered on PyPI.

Its performance stats are also very promising. Following are three sections that deal with different aspects of performance:

• document parsing
• text extraction
• image rendering

PyMuPDF is the faster than pdfrw, PyPDF2, and pdftk.