fast-pdf-extract

Rust backed PDF text extraction library for Python.

Features

• Detect and remove headers and footers
• Clean bilingual PDFs
• Mark headings in bold (basic Markdown)
• High accuracy
• Performance

Development

uv sync --only-dev

# run tests (it rebuilds automatically)
uv run python -m unittest

# updating dependencies
cargo update
uv lock --upgrade

Publishing a new version

1. Check the latest published version.

python - <<'PY'
import json
import urllib.request

with urllib.request.urlopen("https://pypi.org/pypi/fast-pdf-extract/json") as response:
    data = json.load(response)

print(data["info"]["version"])
PY

2. Bump the version in Cargo.toml.

[package]
version = "0.6.1"

3. Refresh lockfiles and run checks.

cargo check
uv lock
just test

4. Build the release artifacts.

rm -rf target/wheels dist
uv run maturin build --release

5. Publish to PyPI.

# MATURIN_PYPI_TOKEN must be set in the environment.
uv run maturin publish --skip-existing

6. Verify PyPI shows the new version.

python - <<'PY'
import json
import urllib.request

with urllib.request.urlopen("https://pypi.org/pypi/fast-pdf-extract/json") as response:
    data = json.load(response)

print(data["info"]["version"])
PY

7. Commit the version bump.

git add Cargo.toml Cargo.lock
git commit -m "Bump version to <version>"

Troubleshooting

If cargo build complains of missing python version.

cargo clean
cargo build