PDF text extraction / parsing
pdfminer.six is a pure Python library for parsing PDF files and extracting text, layout, font, and color information directly from the PDF content stream.
Solves the same problem with a different architecture or at a different layer. Expect to rewrite the integration.
choose when input is scanned page images and you need deep-learning layout parsing into Markdown, not PDF content streams
The official repo for “Dolphin: Document Image Parsing via Heterogeneous Anchor Prompting”, ACL, 2025.
choose when you need LLM-ready Markdown/JSON from complex PDFs and can accept a heavy ML pipeline
Transforms complex documents like PDFs and Office docs into LLM-ready markdown/JSON for your Agentic workflows.
choose when building in Rust and need fast PDF classification, scan detection, and text extraction
Fast Rust library for PDF inspection, classification, and text extraction. Intelligently detects scanned vs text-based PDFs to enable smart routing decisions.
choose when you need vision-LLM OCR for scanned or unreadable PDFs and can afford API-call conversion to Markdown
OCR & Document Extraction using vision models
choose when you need modular ML models for high-quality layout/formula/table extraction and accept AGPL
A Comprehensive Toolkit for High-Quality PDF Content Extraction
choose when your stack is PHP and you need a native PDF parser for text and metadata
PdfParser, a standalone PHP library, provides various tools to extract data from a PDF file.
choose when you need high-speed extraction plus rendering/manipulation and can accept AGPL instead of MIT
PyMuPDF is a high performance Python library for data extraction, analysis, conversion & manipulation of PDF (and other) documents.
choose when building in .NET/C# and need a maintained PDF text extraction library
Read and extract text and other content from PDFs in C# (port of PDFBox)
An earlier or more limited way to do the job. Still the right call when you need something small, proven, or CPU-only.
choose when working in Java and need a narrow PDFBox subclass for layout-preserving text output; no recent maintenance
Converts a pdf file into a text file while keeping the layout of the original pdf. Useful to extract the content from a table in a pdf file for instance. This is a subclass of PDFTextStripper class (from the Apache PDFBox library).
choose when you need simple text extraction plus page manipulation in Python, without pdfminer's detailed layout/font model
A pure-python PDF library capable of splitting, merging, cropping, and transforming the pages of PDF files
Does the same job, but ships as an app. Useful to a person, not swappable into a codebase.
choose when you want a turnkey end-user converter for scanned-book PDFs rather than a programmatic parsing library
PDF craft can convert PDF files into various other formats. This project will focus on processing PDF files of scanned books.
choose when you want a standalone command-line converter to HTML with preserved visual layout
Convert PDF to HTML without losing text or format.
These projects were analysed and named pdfminer.six among their alternatives. The relationship is not symmetric — how pdfminer.six rates them is a separate judgement, made when pdfminer.six is analysed in its own right.
calls pdfminer.six “Choose for a minimal, MIT-licensed text extractor without OCR or layout analysis; good for simple text-only PDFs.”
PDF Parser for AI-ready data. Automate PDF accessibility. Open-source.
calls pdfminer.six “choose when you primarily need deep text extraction from PDFs in Python rather than full document manipulation.”
PDF tooling for Go and the command line.