DisplayList

DisplayList is a list containing drawing commands (text, images, etc.). The intent is two-fold:

  1. as a caching-mechanism to reduce parsing of a page
  2. as a data structure in multi-threading setups, where one thread parses the page and another one renders pages. This aspect is currently not supported by PyMuPDF.

A DisplayList is populated with objects from a page usually by executing Page.getDisplayList(). There also exists an independent constructor.

“Replay” the list (once or many times) by invoking one of its methods run(), getPixmap() or getTextPage().

Method Short Description
run() Run a display list through a device.
getPixmap() generate a pixmap
getTextPage() generate a text page
rect mediabox of the display list

Class API

class DisplayList
__init__(self, mediabox)

Create a new display list.

Parameters:mediabox (Rect) – The page’s rectangle - output of page.bound().
Return type:DisplayList
run(device, matrix, area)

Run the display list through a device. The device will populate the display list with its “commands” (i.e. text extraction or image creation). The display list can later be used to “read” a page many times without having to re-interpret it from the document file.

You will most probably instead use one of the specialized run methods below - getPixmap() or getTextPage().

Parameters:
  • device (Device) – Device
  • matrix (Matrix) – Transformation matrix to apply to the display list contents.
  • area (Rect) – Only the part visible within this area will be considered when the list is run through the device.
getPixmap(matrix = fitz.Identity, colorspace = fitz.csRGB, alpha = 0, clip = None)

Run the display list through a draw device and return a pixmap.

Parameters:
  • matrix (Matrix) – matrix to use. Default is the identity matrix.
  • colorspace (Colorspace) – the desired colorspace. Default is RGB.
  • alpha (int) – determine whether or not (0, default) to include a transparency channel.
  • clip (IRect or Rect) – an area of the full mediabox to which the pixmap should be restricted.
Return type:

Pixmap
Returns:

pixmap of the display list.
getTextPage(flags = TEXT_PRESERVE_LIGATURES | TEXT_PRESERVE_WHITESPACE)

Run the display list through a text device and return a text page.

Parameters:flags (int) – control which information is parsed into a text page. Default value in PyMuPDF is TEXT_PRESERVE_LIGATURES | TEXT_PRESERVE_WHITESPACE = 3, i.e. ligatures are passed through (not decomposed into components), white spaces are passed through (not translated to spaces), and images are not included. See Preserve Text Flags.
Return type:TextPage
Returns:text page of the display list.
rect

Contains the display list’s mediabox. This will equal the page’s rectangle if it was created via page.getDisplayList().

Type:Rect