Change Logs

Changes in Version 1.12.2

This is an extension of 1.12.1.

  • Method Page.showPDFpage() now accepts the new clip argument. This specifies an area of the source page to which the display should be restricted.
  • New Page.CropBox and Page.MediaBox have been included for convenience.

Changes in Version 1.12.1

This is an extension of version 1.12.0.

  • New method Page.showPDFpage() displays another’s PDF page. This is a vector image and remains precise across zooming. Both involved documents must be PDF.
  • New method Page.getSVGimage() creates an SVG image from the page. The return is a unicode text string, which can be saved in a .svg file.
  • Method Page.getTextBlocks() now accepts an additional bool parameter “images”. If set to true (default is false), images contained in the TextPage are included in the produced list and thus allow detecting areas with rendered images.
  • Minor bug fixes.
  • “text” result of Page.getText() concatenates all lines within a block using a single space character. MuPDF’s original uses “\n” instead, producing a rather ragged output.
  • New properties of Page objects Page.MediaBoxSize and Page.CropBoxPosition provide more information about a page’s dimensions. For non-PDF files (and for most PDF files, too) these will be equal to Page.rect.bottom_right, resp. Page.rect.top_left. For example, class Shape makes use of them to correctly position its items.

Changes in Version 1.12.0

This version is based on and requires MuPDF v1.12. The new MuPDF version contains quite a number of changes - most of them around text extraction. Some of the changes impact the programmer’s API.

  • Outline.saveText() and Outline.saveXML() have been deleted without replacement. You probably have not used them much anyway. But if you are looking for a replacement: the output of Document.getToC() can easily be used to produce something equivalent.
  • Class TextSheet does no longer exist.
  • Text “spans”, one of the hierarchy levels of text pages, no longer contain positioning information (i.e. no “bbox” key). Instead, spans now provide the font information for its text. This impacts our JSON output variant.
  • HTML output has improved very much: it now creates valid documents which can be displayed by browsers to produce a similar view as the original document.
  • There is a new output format XHTML, which provides text and images in a browser-readable format. The difference to HTML output is, that no effort is made to reproduce the original layout.
  • All output formats of Page.getText() now support creating complete, valid documents, by wrapping them with appropriate header and trailer information. If you are interested in using the HTML output, please make sure to read Controlling Quality of HTML Output.
  • To support finding text positions, we have added special methods that don’t need detours like TextPage.extractJSON() or TextPage.extractXML(): use Page.getTextBlocks() or resp. Page.getTextWords() to create lists of text blocks or resp. words which are accompanied by their rectangles. This should be much faster than the standard text extraction methods and also avoids using additional packages for interpreting their output.

Changes in Version 1.11.2

This is an extension of v1.11.1.

  • New Page.insertFont() creates a PDF /Font object and returns its object number.

  • New Document.extractFont() extracts the content of an embedded font given its object number.

  • Methods *FontList(...) items no longer contain the PDF generation number. This value never had any significance. Instead, the font file extension is included (e.g. “pfa” for a “PostScript Font for ASCII”), which is more valuable information.

  • Fonts other than “simple fonts” (Type1) are now also supported.

  • New options to change Pixmap size:

    • Method Pixmap.shrink() reduces the pixmap proportionally in place.
    • A new Pixmap copy constructor allows scaling via setting target width and height.

Changes in Version 1.11.1

This is an extension of v1.11.0.

  • New class Shape. It facilitates and extends the creation of image shapes on PDF pages. It contains multiple methods for creating elementary shapes like lines, rectangles or circles, which can be combined into more complex ones and be given common properties like line width or colors. Combined shapes are handled as a unit and e.g. be “morphed” together. The class can accumulate multiple complex shapes and put them all in the page’s foreground or background - thus also reducing the number of updates to the page’s /Contents object.
  • All Page draw methods now use the new Shape class.
  • Text insertion methods insertText() and insertTextBox() now support morphing in addition to text rotation. They have become part of the Shape class and thus allow text to be freely combined with graphics.
  • A new Pixmap constructor allows creating pixmap copies with an added alpha channel. A new method also allows directly manipulating alpha values.
  • Binary algebraic operations with geometry objects (matrices, rectangles and points) now generally also support lists or tuples as the second operand. You can add a tuple (x, y) of numbers to a Point. In this context, such sequences are called “point-like” (resp. matrix-like, rectangle-like).
  • Geometry objects now fully support in-place operators. For example, p /= m replaces point p with p * 1/m for a number, or p * ~m for a matrix-like object m. Similarly, if r is a rectangle, then r |= (3, 4) is the new rectangle that also includes fitz.Point(3, 4), and r &= (1, 2, 3, 4) is its intersection with fitz.Rect(1, 2, 3, 4).

Changes in Version 1.11.0

This version is based on and requires MuPDF v1.11.

Though MuPDF has declared it as being mostly a bug fix version, one major new feature is indeed contained: support of embedded files - also called portfolios or collections. We have extended PyMuPDF functionality to embrace this up to an extent just a little beyond the mutool utility as follows.

  • The Document class now support embedded files with several new methods and one new property:

    • embeddedFileInfo() returns metadata information about an entry in the list of embedded files. This is more than mutool currently provides: it shows all the information that was used to embed the file (not just the entry’s name).
    • embeddedFileGet() retrieves the (decompressed) content of an entry into a bytes buffer.
    • embeddedFileAdd(...) inserts new content into the PDF portfolio. We (in contrast to mutool) restrict this to entries with a new name (no duplicate names allowed).
    • embeddedFileDel(...) deletes an entry from the portfolio (function not offered in MuPDF).
    • embeddedFileSetInfo() - changes filename or description of an embedded file.
    • embeddedFileCount - contains the number of embedded files.

  • Several enhancements deal with streamlining geometry objects. These are not connected to the new MuPDF version and most of them are also reflected in PyMuPDF v1.10.0. Among them are new properties to identify the corners of rectangles by name (e.g. Rect.bottom_right) and new methods to deal with set-theoretic questions like Rect.contains(x) or IRect.intersects(x). Special effort focussed on supporting more “Pythonic” language constructs: if x in rect ... is equivalent to rect.contains(x).

  • The Rect chapter now has more background on empty amd infinite rectangles and how we handle them. The handling itself was also updated for more consistency in this area.

  • We have started basic support for generation of PDF content:

    • Document.insertPage() adds a new page into a PDF, optionally containing some text.
    • Page.insertImage() places a new image on a PDF page.
    • Page.insertText() puts new text on an existing page

  • For FileAttachment annotations, content and name of the attached file can extracted and changed.

Changes in Version 1.10.0

MuPDF v1.10 Impact

MuPDF version 1.10 has a significant impact on our bindings. Some of the changes also affect the API - in other words, you as a PyMuPDF user.

  • Link destination information has been reduced. Several properties of the linkDest class no longer contain valuable information. In fact, this class as a whole has been deleted from MuPDF’s library and we in PyMuPDF only maintain it to provide compatibilty to existing code.

  • In an effort to minimize memory requirements, several improvements have been built into MuPDF v1.10:

    • A new config.h file can be used to de-select unwanted features in the C base code. Using this feature we have been able to reduce the size of our binary _fitz.o / _fitz.pyd by about 50% (from 9 MB to 4.5 MB). When UPX-ing this, the size goes even further down to a very handy 2.3 MB.
    • The alpha (transparency) channel for pixmaps is now optional. Letting alpha default to False significantly reduces pixmap sizes (by 20% - CMYK, 25% - RGB, 50% - GRAY). Many Pixmap constructors therefore now accept an alpha boolean to control inclusion of this channel. Other pixmap constructors (e.g. those for file and image input) create pixmaps with no alpha alltogether. On the downside, save methods for pixmaps no longer accept a savealpha option: this channel will always be saved when present. To minimize code breaks, we have left this parameter in the call patterns - it will just be ignored.

  • DisplayList and TextPage class constructors now require the mediabox of the page they are referring to (i.e. the page.bound() rectangle). There is no way to construct this information from other sources, therefore a source code change cannot be avoided in these cases. We assume however, that not many users are actually employing these rather low level classes explixitely. So the impact of that change should be minor.

Other Changes compared to Version 1.9.3

  • The new Document method write() writes an opened PDF to memory (as opposed to a file, like save() does).
  • An annotation can now be scaled and moved around on its page. This is done by modifying its rectangle.
  • Annotations can now be deleted. Page contains the new method deleteAnnot().
  • Various annotation attributes can now be modified, e.g. content, dates, title (= author), border, colors.
  • Method Document.insertPDF() now also copies annotations of source pages.
  • The Pages class has been deleted. As documents can now be accessed with page numbers as indices (like doc[n] = doc.loadPage(n)), and document object can be used as iterators, the benefit of this class was too low to maintain it. See the following comments.
  • loadPage(n) / doc[n] now accept arbitrary integers to specify a page number, as long as n < pageCount. So, e.g. doc[-500] is always valid and will load page (-500) % pageCount.
  • A document can now also be used as an iterator like this: for page in doc: ...<do something with "page"> .... This will yield all pages of doc as page.
  • The Pixmap method getSize() has been replaced with property size. As before Pixmap.size == len(Pixmap) is true.
  • In response to transparency (alpha) being optional, several new parameters and properties have been added to Pixmap and Colorspace classes to support determining their characteristics.
  • The Page class now contains new properties firstAnnot and firstLink to provide starting points to the respective class chains, where firstLink is just a mnemonic synonym to method loadLinks() which continues to exist. Similarly, the new property rect is a synonym for method bound(), which also continues to exist.
  • Pixmap methods samplesRGB() and samplesAlpha() have been deleted because pixmaps can now be created without transparency.
  • Rect now has a property irect which is a synonym of method round(). Likewise, IRect now has property rect to deliver a Rect which has the same coordinates as floats values.
  • Document has the new method searchPageFor() to search for a text string. It works exactly like the corresponding Page.searchFor() with page number as additional parameter.

Changes in Version 1.9.3

This version is also based on MuPDF v1.9a. Changes compared to version 1.9.2:

  • As a major enhancement, annotations are now supported in a similar way as links. Annotations can be displayed (as pixmaps) and their properties can be accessed.

  • In addition to the document select() method, some simpler methods can now be used to manipulate a PDF:

    • copyPage() copies a page within a document.
    • movePage() is similar, but deletes the original.
    • deletePage() deletes a page
    • deletePageRange() deletes a page range

  • rotation or setRotation() access or change a PDF page’s rotation, respectively.

  • Available but undocumented before, IRect, Rect, Point and Matrix support the len() method and their coordinate properties can be accessed via indices, e.g. IRect.x1 == IRect[2].

  • For convenience, documents now support simple indexing: doc.loadPage(n) == doc[n]. The index may however be in range -pageCount < n < pageCount, such that doc[-1] is the last page of the document.

Changes in Version 1.9.2

This version is also based on MuPDF v1.9a. Changes compared to version 1.9.1:

  • fitz.open() (no parameters) creates a new empty PDF document, i.e. if saved afterwards, it must be given a .pdf extension.

  • Document now accepts all of the following formats (Document and open are synonyms):

    • open(),
    • open(filename) (equivalent to open(filename, None)),
    • open(filetype, area) (equivalent to open(filetype, stream = area)).

    Type of memory area stream may be str (Python 2), bytes (Python 3) or bytearray (Python 2 and 3). Thus, e.g. area = open("file.pdf", "rb").read() may be used directly (without first converting it to bytearray).

  • New method Document.insertPDF() (PDFs only) inserts a range of pages from another PDF.

  • Document objects doc now support the len() function: len(doc) == doc.pageCount.

  • New method Document.getPageImageList() creates a list of images used on a page.

  • New method Document.getPageFontList() creates a list of fonts referenced by a page.

  • New pixmap constructor fitz.Pixmap(doc, xref) creates a pixmap based on an opened PDF document and an XREF number of the image.

  • New pixmap constructor fitz.Pixmap(cspace, spix) creates a pixmap as a copy of another one spix with the colorspace converted to cspace. This works for all colorspace combinations.

  • Pixmap constructor fitz.Pixmap(colorspace, width, height, samples) now allows samples to also be str (Python 2) or bytes (Python 3), not only bytearray.

Changes in Version 1.9.1

This version of PyMuPDF is based on MuPDF library source code version 1.9a published on April 21, 2016.

Please have a look at MuPDF’s website to see which changes and enhancements are contained herein.

Changes in version 1.9.1 compared to version 1.8.0 are the following:

  • New methods getRectArea() for both fitz.Rect and fitz.IRect
  • Pixmaps can now be created directly from files using the new constructor fitz.Pixmap(filename).
  • The Pixmap constructor fitz.Pixmap(image) has been extended accordingly.
  • fitz.Rect can now be created with all possible combinations of points and coordinates.
  • PyMuPDF classes and methods now all contain __doc__ strings, most of them created by SWIG automatically. While the PyMuPDF documentation certainly is more detailed, this feature should help a lot when programming in Python-aware IDEs.
  • A new document method of getPermits() returns the permissions associated with the current access to the document (print, edit, annotate, copy), as a Python dictionary.
  • The identity matrix fitz.Identity is now immutable.
  • The new document method select(list) removes all pages from a document that are not contained in the list. Pages can also be duplicated and re-arranged.
  • Various improvements and new members in our demo and examples collections. Perhaps most prominently: PDF_display now supports scrolling with the mouse wheel, and there is a new example program wxTableExtract which allows to graphically identify and extract table data in documents.
  • fitz.open() is now an alias of fitz.Document().
  • New pixmap method getPNGData() which will return a bytearray formatted as a PNG image of the pixmap.
  • New pixmap method samplesRGB() providing a samples version with alpha bytes stripped off (RGB colorspaces only).
  • New pixmap method samplesAlpha() providing the alpha bytes only of the samples area.
  • New iterator fitz.Pages(doc) over a document’s set of pages.
  • New matrix methods invert() (calculate inverted matrix), concat() (calculate matrix product), preTranslate() (perform a shift operation).
  • New IRect methods intersect() (intersection with another rectangle), translate() (perform a shift operation).
  • New Rect methods intersect() (intersection with another rectangle), transform() (transformation with a matrix), includePoint() (enlarge rectangle to also contain a point), includeRect() (enlarge rectangle to also contain another one).
  • Documented Point.transform() (transform a point with a matrix).
  • Matrix, IRect, Rect and Point classes now support compact, algebraic formulations for manipulating such objects.
  • Incremental saves for changes are possible now using the call pattern doc.save(doc.name, incremental=True).
  • A PDF’s metadata can now be deleted, set or changed by document method setMetadata(). Supports incremental saves.
  • A PDF’s bookmarks (or table of contents) can now be deleted, set or changed with the entries of a list using document method setToC(list). Supports incremental saves.