pdftract

A PDF text extraction library that gets the hard parts right.

Platform Support

Platform	Status
Linux x86_64	Fully CI-tested (gating CI on every PR)
Linux aarch64	Fully CI-tested
macOS x86_64	Build-tested; manually smoke-tested per release
macOS aarch64	Build-tested; manually smoke-tested per release
Windows x86_64	Build-tested; manually smoke-tested per release

Note: Linux is fully CI-tested; macOS and Windows are build-tested and manually smoke-tested per release. See docs/operations/manual-platform-smoke.md for the per-release smoke procedure.

Installation

Minimum Supported Rust Version (MSRV): 1.78

cargo

cargo install pdftract

pip

pip install pdftract

Docker

docker pull ronaldraygun/pdftract:latest

Homebrew

brew install pdftract

Quickstart

Rust

use pdftract_core::{extract_pdf, ExtractionOptions};

let opts = ExtractionOptions::default();
let doc = extract_pdf("file.pdf", &opts)?;
println!("Extracted {} pages", doc.metadata.page_count);

Python

import pdftract

doc = pdftract.extract("file.pdf")
print(f"Extracted {doc['metadata']['page_count']} pages")

CLI

pdftract extract file.pdf --json result.json   # JSON output
pdftract extract file.pdf --text -             # Plain text to stdout
pdftract serve --port 8080                     # HTTP microservice

What it does

• Correct reading order — layout regions are segmented and sequenced before text is emitted, handling multi-column pages, sidebars, footnotes, and mixed-layout documents
• Font encoding recovery — when ToUnicode CMaps are absent, wrong, or incomplete, pdftract works through a layered recovery pipeline: glyph name lookup, font fingerprinting, and glyph outline shape matching
• Structure tree extraction — PDF/UA and PDF/A documents encode their logical structure; pdftract reads this directly when present
• Per-page hybrid routing — each page is independently classified and routed to the appropriate pipeline: vector text extraction, full OCR, or assisted OCR
• Structured output with provenance — the primary output is JSON carrying per-span bounding boxes, font name, size, and confidence score

Documentation

• User docs: docs/user-docs (mdBook) — Comprehensive user guide at pdftract.com
• API reference: docs.rs/pdftract — Rust API documentation
• Extraction output schema: docs/research/extraction-output-schema.md
• SDK architecture: docs/notes/sdk-architecture.md
• Platform smoke procedure: docs/operations/manual-platform-smoke.md
• Releases: GitHub Releases
• crates.io: pdftract
• Contributing guide: CONTRIBUTING.md
• Security policy: SECURITY.md
• Changelog: CHANGELOG.md
• License: LICENSE-MIT or LICENSE-APACHE

License

Licensed under either of:

• MIT License (LICENSE-MIT or https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)
• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)

at your option.