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pdfminer.six

Pure-Python library for pulling text, images and structure out of a PDF, with a command-line tool.

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Where your files are processed

No server involved

A pure-Python library and its pdf2txt.py command line. It runs in your own interpreter with no service, no account and no network call in the package. That is a property of the library itself: what an application built with it does with your file depends on that application, not on this.

A Python package that runs in your own interpreter. There is no service, no account and no network call in the library or in pdf2txt.py, so a document never leaves the machine handling it.

What it does

pdfminer.six parses a PDF into Python objects and then groups the text the way a person reads it, so the output is closer to prose than to a dump of positioned glyphs. It also extracts images, the table of contents, tagged content and AcroForm fields, and it handles CJK text, vertical writing and encrypted files. It installs with pip, and its own code is pure Python, though the installation brings cryptography and optionally Pillow for images, so wheel availability and source-build prerequisites depend on your platform and Python version. A command-line tool, pdf2txt.py, does the common job without writing any code.

Best for: Python projects that need the text layer of a PDF without adding a heavyweight dependency, and anyone working with documents in Chinese, Japanese or Korean, where its handling of CJK and vertical writing is a genuine strength rather than a footnote. It is also a reasonable choice for reading AcroForm field values out of a form.

Worth knowing: Its output is plain text and the reading order is inferred from layout, so a table comes out as loose lines rather than as a structure, and a complex multi-column page can interleave in ways that are hard to predict — Python projects that need tables should be looking at Camelot or pdfplumber instead. It also does not write PDFs: pdfminer.six is a reader, so it is not a tool for producing a searchable file from a scan, and an image-only PDF yields nothing without a separate OCR step. Two smaller things are worth knowing before you build on it. The documentation's own FAQ explains why some files produce (cid:x) values instead of text, which is a font-mapping problem rather than a bug, but it will look like broken output if you meet it first. And the copyright in the licence belongs to the original author of pdfminer, from 2004 to 2016, because this is the maintained continuation of that project under a new name rather than a fresh one.

Details, and where each comes from

Vendor statements, our own reading of their pages, and the things nobody has established yet, each answered separately. Where we have not confirmed something it says so rather than guessing, and a row nobody has established is greyed out.

Versions covered
Linux · Windows · macOS · Self-hosted
Website
pdfminersix.readthedocs.io
Requires an account
Not applicable
Watermark on the free tier
Not verified
Maximum file size
Not verified
Batch processing
Yes
Data residency
Self-hosted
Open source
Yes
Self-hostable
Yes
Licence
MIT
Redaction
No redaction feature
Programmatic access
Embeddable library · Command line
Last availability check
Responded in 55 ms 16 October 2026

Checked automatically by our own runner, not reported by the vendor. 100% of our last 30 checks got a response.

What the redaction verdict rests on

From the vendor's own documentation, read 22 September 2026. Not tested by us.

“Pdfminer.six is a python package for extracting information from PDF documents.”

What that does not establish: Recorded as `none` on absence from the documented feature set, which is a list of things that read a PDF: parse objects, group text, extract text, images, table of contents and tagged content, support encryption and AcroForm fields. Nothing in it removes content, and the library does not write PDFs at all. What it does not establish: that extracted text is safe. This is the same point the Apache Tika record makes — an extraction tool's output carries whatever was in the document, and reading it is not redacting it.

https://pdfminersix.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

What the vendor says

Claims are labelled rather than repeated as fact. Where we have checked something ourselves, it says so and shows when. Checked means we read the vendor's own page and it says what we recorded — not that we tested the behaviour, unless the note says we did.

  • “Pdfminer.six is a python package for extracting information from PDF documents.”

    Checked by us — the source says this Read 1 October 2026

    Confirmed. The quoted text appears in the rendered page as read on 2026-10-01. This claim was carried as reported rather than checked until this read.

    Standing: Not re-read against the live source

    Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
    Read
    https://pdfminersix.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
    From
    the text a browser renders
    SHA-256
    b41c2d231127ebb21ea446a29f89fd8f20cb9477eef87cae23fb8caf261c9a6a

    How we checked: Read as rendered text in headless Chrome on 2026-10-01 and saved to the evidence archive, so the read can be repeated against the same file. Comparison ignores case, punctuation and hyphenation, which is why "open-source" on the record matches "open source" on the page.

    What this hash proves, and what it does not

  • “Extract text, images (JPG, JBIG2 and Bitmaps), table-of-contents, tagged contents and more.”

    Checked by us — the source says this Read 1 October 2026

    Confirmed. The quoted text appears in the rendered page as read on 2026-10-01. This claim was carried as reported rather than checked until this read.

    Standing: Not re-read against the live source

    Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
    Read
    https://pdfminersix.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
    From
    the text a browser renders
    SHA-256
    b41c2d231127ebb21ea446a29f89fd8f20cb9477eef87cae23fb8caf261c9a6a

    How we checked: Read as rendered text in headless Chrome on 2026-10-01 and saved to the evidence archive, so the read can be repeated against the same file. Comparison ignores case, punctuation and hyphenation, which is why "open-source" on the record matches "open source" on the page.

    What this hash proves, and what it does not

Each claim is quoted from the vendor's own pages. This section describes what we have and have not checked — it is not a judgement about anyone.

Sponsorship is distribution, not an endorsement or a promise of search rankings, AI citations, traffic, or sales. This listing is a free entry, compiled from published sources.

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Related reading

How this record was put together

Editorial review.
No editor has signed this record off. That is not the same as nothing having been checked, and the lines below say what has.
Source reading.
2 claims taken from the vendor's own pages, read between 1 October 2026 and 1 October 2026.
Website availability.
The vendor's site was last checked on 16 October 2026.
Behaviour testing.
We ran this ourselves. The file handling was watched directly.

Sources: pdfminersix.readthedocs.io, read 2026-09-22 with headless Chrome, including the feature list and installation instructions; the licence from the project's LICENSE file in its repository. Project documentation, not independently tested; the package was not installed and no PDF was parsed.