Introduction

A permissively-licensed, pure-Rust reimplementation of PyMuPDF (fitz) — with a Python API, an import fitz compatibility shim, and an pdfspine command-line tool.

pdfspine lets you read, search, extract, edit, and render PDFs from Python with a PyMuPDF-shaped API — but the entire engine is written in safe Rust and shipped under Apache-2.0. Existing code that does import fitz can run unmodified on the supported subset via the opt-in shim (pdfspine.install_fitz_shim(), or import pdfspine.fitz as fitz), while new code can use the idiomatic import pdfspine package directly.

Why pdfspine?

PyMuPDF is excellent, but it is AGPL-3.0 (or a paid commercial license from Artifex). That licensing is a non-starter for many closed-source products, SaaS backends, and permissively-licensed open-source projects.

pdfspine exists to be the permissively-licensed, drop-in-shaped alternative:

• Apache-2.0 throughout. Every first-party crate is Apache-2.0 — a permissive license with an explicit patent grant. The dependency graph is gated by cargo-deny to exclude GPL / AGPL / LGPL / MPL / SSPL from the shipped wheel. License cleanliness is a CI-enforced, tested property, not a promise.
• Pure Rust, no C blob. Self-contained wheels with no system zlib / C linkage and no bundled prebuilt engine — the differentiator versus pdfium-based wrappers.
• Memory-safe by construction. #![forbid(unsafe_code)] in all first-party crates except the single audited PyO3 FFI chokepoint.
• fitz / pymupdf-compatible surface (opt-in). A compatibility shim aims to let existing import fitz code run unchanged for the supported subset — import pdfspine.fitz as fitz, or pdfspine.install_fitz_shim() to claim the global names (collision-safe by default), with a machine-readable COMPAT.toml documenting every deviation.
• Clean-room. An independent reimplementation: no code, tests, or fixtures are derived from MuPDF / PyMuPDF or any AGPL source.

Feature highlights

• Open PDFs from a path or in-memory bytes, including encrypted documents (RC4 / AES-128 / AES-256), with authenticate() and permission flags.
• Text extraction in every PyMuPDF variant: text, words, blocks, dict, rawdict, json, html, xhtml, xml.
• Search with search_for, returning Rect or Quad hit geometry.
• Table detection (find_tables) with to_markdown() / to_html() export.
• Rendering any page to a Pixmap via get_pixmap (text, vector fills, strokes, images, clips, shadings), plus DisplayList replay and SVG export.
• Editing: merge / split / insert pages, insert text / images, draw vectors, annotations, AcroForm forms, redaction, metadata, table-of-contents, links.
• Save full or incremental, with optional garbage collection, deflate compression, and encryption.
• Zero-copy Pixmap via the Python buffer protocol (memoryview(pix) / numpy.frombuffer(pix)).

Status

The current baseline targets PyMuPDF 1.24.x. The machine-readable COMPAT.toml tracks the disposition of every public PyMuPDF symbol:

Anything not yet implemented raises a typed, catchable PdfUnsupportedError (never a bare AttributeError), so you always get a clear signal — see Migrating from PyMuPDF.

Quick example

import pdfspine  # or, opt-in shim: import pdfspine.fitz as fitz

doc = pdfspine.open("input.pdf")
print(f"{doc.page_count} pages")

page = doc[0]
text = page.get_text()                 # plain text
hits = page.search_for("invoice")      # list[Rect]

pix = page.get_pixmap(dpi=150)         # render to an image
pix.save("page-0.png")

doc.save("output.pdf", garbage=3, deflate=True)
doc.close()

Ready to go? Start with the guides below.