This is the place of development for a liberal-licensed Python PDF rendering library, powered by PDFium.

• CPython >= 3.6 ¹
• Windows amd64 / arm64 / win32
• macOS x86_64 (10.13+) / arm64 (11.0+)
• Linux (glibc) x86_64 / i686 / aarch64 / armv7l
• Linux (musl) x86_64 / i686 / aarch64

(as of Mar 2023)

python3 -m pip install pypdfium2

import pypdfium2 as pdfium

# Load a document
pdf = pdfium.PdfDocument("tests/resources/multipage.pdf")

# Loop over pages and render
for i in range(len(pdf)):
    page = pdf[i]
    image = page.render(scale=4).to_pil()
    image.save(f"output_{i:03d}.jpg")

• Liberal license: Apache-2.0 / BSD-3-Clause, plus various other liberal licenses for third-party components of PDFium.
• Wide range of supported platforms and Python versions.
• No mandatory runtime dependencies.
• Can process encrypted (password-protected) PDFs.
• Rendering is fast, outperforming ghostscript and poppler. In terms of speed, pypdfium2 can almost reach pymupdf.
• Multiple choices for the rendering return type:
  • ctypes.c_ubyte array
  • PIL.Image.Image
  • numpy.ndarray

• pypdfium2 repository (with support model code)
• pypdfium2 documentation
• ctypes documentation
• pdfium repository
• pdfium merge requests
• pdfium bug tracker
• pdfium mailing list

For pdfium documentation, please look at the comments in its public header files (public/*.h).