Changelog

4.29.0 (2024-04-10)

• Updated PDFium from 6337 to 6406.

4.28.0 (2024-03-10)

• Updated PDFium from 6281 to 6337.

• get_text_range(): Fixed a buffer size regression introduced in v4.26.0, caused by an unexpected behavior change in pdfium (thanks @elonzh for the bug report, #298). Since that change, it is not possible anymore to tell the exact amount of memory needed, so we have to allocate for the worst case. Therefore, while this problem persists, it is recommended to instead use get_text_bounded() where possible.

4.27.0 (2024-02-10)

• Updated PDFium from 6233 to 6281.

• Added ability to define $CTYPESGEN_PIN when building sdist via ./run craft pypi --sdist, which allows to reproduce our sdists when set to the head commit hash of pypdfium2-team/ctypesgen at the time of the build to reproduce. Alternatively, you may patch the relevant pyproject.toml entry yourself and use PDFIUM_PLATFORM=sdist python -m build --sdist as usual.

• Set up Dependabot for GH Actions. Updated dependencies accordingly.

4.26.0 (2024-01-10)

• Updated PDFium from 6164 to 6233.

• Pin ctypesgen in sdist to prevent reoccurrence of #264 / #286. As a drawback, the pin is never committed, so the sdist is not simply reproducible at this time due to dependence on the latest commit hash of the ctypesgen fork at build time.

• Wheel tags: Added back manylinux2014 in addition to manylinux_{glibc_ver} to be on the safe side. Suspected relation to the above issues.

4.25.0 (2023-12-10)

• Updated PDFium from 6110 to 6164.

• Removed multiprocessing from deprecated PdfDocument.render() API and replaced with linear rendering. See below for more info.

• setup: Fixed blunder in headers cache logic that would cause existing headers to be always reused regardless of version. Note, this did not affect release workflows, only local source re-installs.

• Show path of linked binary in pypdfium2 -v.

• conda: Improved installation docs and channel config.

• conda/workflows: Added ability to (re-)build pypdfium2_raw bindings with any given version of pdfium. Fixes #279.

• Made reference bindings more universal by including V8, XFA and Skia symbols. This is possible due to the dynamic symbol guards.

• Instruct ctypesgen to exclude some unused alias symbols pulled in from struct tags.

• Improved issue templates, added pull request template.

• Improved ctypesgen (pypdfium2-team fork).

Rationale for PdfDocument.render() deprecation

• The parallel rendering API unfortunately was an inherent design mistake: Multiprocessing is not meant to transfer large amounts of pixel data from workers to the main process.

• This was such a heavy drawback that it basically outweighed the parallelization, so there was no real performance advantage, only higher memory load.

• As a related problem, the worker pool produces bitmaps at an indepedent speed, regardless of where the receiving iteration might be, so bitmaps could queue up in memory, possibly causing an enormeous rise in memory consumption over time. This effect was pronounced e.g. with PNG saving via PIL, as exhibited in Facebook’s nougat project.

• Instead, each bitmap should be processed (e.g. saved) in the job which created it. Only a minimal, final result should be sent back to the main process (e.g. a file path).

• This means we cannot reasonably provide a generic parallel renderer, instead it needs to be implemented by callers.

• Historically, note that there had been even more faults in the implementation:

  • Prior to 4.22.0, the pool was always initialized with os.cpu_count() processes by default, even when rendering less pages.

  • Prior to 4.20.0, a full-scale input transfer was conducted on each job (rendering it unusable with bytes input). However, this can and should be done only once on process creation.

• pypdfium2’s rendering CLI cleanly re-implements parallel rendering to files. We may want to turn this into an API in the future.

Due to the potential for serious issues as outlined above, we strongly recommend that end users update and dependants bump their minimum requirement to this version. Callers should move away from PdfDocument.render() and use PdfPage.render() instead.

4.24.0 (2023-11-10)

• Updated PDFium from 6097 to 6110.

• Added GitHub issue templates.

4.23.1 (2023-10-31)

• No PDFium update.

• Fixed (Test)PyPI upload.

4.23.0 (2023-10-31)

Note: (Test)PyPI upload failed for this release due to an oversight.

• Updated PDFium from 6070 to 6097.

• Fixed faulty version repr (avoid trailing + if desc is empty).

• Merged conda packaging code, including CI and Readme integration.

• Updated setup code, mainly to support conda.

  • Independent bindings cache. Download headers from pdfium. Extract archive members explicitly.

  • Cleaned up version integration of sourcebuild.

  • Changed system platform to generate files according to given version, instead of expecting given files.

  • Added prepared! prefix to platform spec, allowing to install with given files.

  • Added PDFIUM_BINDINGS=reference to use pre-built bindings when installing from source.

• Updated Readme.

4.22.0 (2023-10-19)

• Updated PDFium from 6056 to 6070.

• Changed PDFIUM_PLATFORM=none to strictly exclude all data files. Added new target system consuming bindings and version files supplied by the caller.

• Enhanced integration of separate modules. This blazes the trail for conda packaging. We had to move metadata back to setup.cfg since we need a dynamic project name, which pyproject.toml does not support.

• Major improvements to version integration.

  • Ship version info as JSON files, separately for each submodule. Expose as immutable classes. Legacy members have been retained for backwards compatibility.

  • Autorelease uses dedicated JSON files for state tracking and control.

  • Read version info from git describe, providing definite identification.

  • If a local git repo is not available or git describe failed (e.g. sdist or shallow checkout), fall back to a supplied version file or the autorelease record. However, you are strongly encouraged to provide a setup that works with git describe where possible.

• Added musllinux aarch64 wheel. Thanks to @jerbob92.

4.21.0 (2023-10-11)

• Updated PDFium from 6002 to 6056.

• PdfTextPage.get_text_range(): Correct the allocation in case of excluded/inserted chars, modify scope to prevent pdfium from reading beyond range(index, index+count) (which otherwise it does with leading excluded chars). Update docs to note the two different representations. Thanks to Nikita Rybak for the discovery (#261).

• Setup changes (partly ported from the devel branch)

  • ctypesgen fork: replaced the old, bloated library loader with a new, lean version

  • Merged $PDFIUM_VERSION and $PDFIUM_USE_V8 into the existing $PDFIUM_PLATFORM specifier (see Readme for updated description).

  • Removed the build package from pyproject buildsystem requires, where it was unnecessary. Thanks to Anaconda Team.

  • Split in two separate modules: pypdfium2 for helpers (pure-python), pypdfium2_raw for the core bindings (data files).

• Switched PyPI upload to “trusted publishing” (OIDC), which is considered safer. Further, the core maintainers have set up 2FA as requested by PyPI.

Note: Earlier releases may fail to install from source due to API-breaking changes to our ctypesgen fork (see #264). Where possible, avoid source installs and use the wheels instead (the default behavior). If you actually have to do this, consider --no-build-isolation and pre-installed dependencies, including ctypesgen prior to commit 61c638b.

Warning: musllinux wheels prior to pdfium-binaries 6043 might be invalid.

4.21.0b1 (2023-09-14)

• Updated PDFium from 5989 to 6002.

4.20.0 (2023-09-10)

This release backports some key fixes/improvements from the development branch

• Updated PDFium from 5975 to 5989.

• [V8/XFA] Fixed XFA init. This issue was caused by a typo in a struct field. Thanks to Benoît Blanchon.

• [ctypesgen fork] Prevent setting nonexistent struct fields.

• [V8/XFA] Expose V8/XFA exclusive members in the bindings file by passing ctypesgen the pre-processor defines in question.

• Fixed some major non-API implementation issues with multipage rendering:

  • Avoid full state data transfer and object re-initialization for each job. Instead, use a pool initializer and exploit global variables. This also makes bytes input tolerable for parallel rendering.

  • In the CLI, use a custom converter to save directly in workers instead of serializing bitmaps to the main process.

• Set pdfium version fields to unknown for PDFIUM_PLATFORM=none (sdist). This prevents encoding a potentially incorrect version. Also improve CLI version print.

• Fixed sourcebuild with system libraries.

• Fixed RTD build (system_packages option removal).

• Attempt to fix automatic GH pages rebuild on release.

4.19.0 (2023-08-28)

• Updated PDFium from 5868 to 5975.

• Reset main branch to stable and shifted v5 development to a branch, so that pdfium updates (and possibly bug fixes) can still be handled. v5 development is delayed and unexpectedly tough, so this seemed necessary.

• The automated schedule has been slowed down from weekly to monthly for the time being. Further manual releases may be triggered as necessary.

4.18.0 (2023-07-04)

• Updated PDFium from 5854 to 5868.

4.17.0 (2023-06-27)

• Updated PDFium from 5841 to 5854.

4.16.0 (2023-06-20)

• Updated PDFium from 5827 to 5841.

4.15.0 (2023-06-13)

• Updated PDFium from 5813 to 5827.

• In helpers, closing a parent object now automatically closes the children to ensure correct order. This notably enhances safety of closing and absorbs the common mistake of closing a parent but missing child close calls. See commit eb07605 for more info.

• In init_forms(), attempt to call FPDF_LoadXFA() and warn on failure, though as of this writing it always fails.

4.14.0 (2023-06-06)

• Updated PDFium from 5799 to 5813.

4.13.0 (2023-05-30)

• Updated PDFium from 5786 to 5799.

4.12.0 (2023-05-23)

• Updated PDFium from 5772 to 5786.

4.11.0 (2023-05-16)

• Updated PDFium from 5758 to 5772.

• In PdfDocument.render(), fixed a bad bitmap.close() call that would lead to a downstream use after free when using the combination of foreign bitmap and no-copy conversion. Using foreign bitmaps was not the default and expressly not recommended.

4.10.0 (2023-05-09)

• Updated PDFium from 5744 to 5758.

4.9.0 (2023-05-02)

• Updated PDFium from 5731 to 5744.

4.8.0 (2023-04-25)

• Updated PDFium from 5715 to 5731.

• PdfTextPage.get_rect(): Added missing return code check and updated docs regarding dependence on count_rects(). Fixed related test code that was broken but disabled by accident (missing asserts). Thanks to Guy Rosin for reporting #207.

• Added PdfImage.get_size() wrapping the new pdfium function FPDFImageObj_GetImagePixelSize(), which is faster than getting image size through the metadata.

• build_pdfium.py --use-syslibs: Changed sysroot="/" (invalid) to use_sysroot=false (valid). This allows us to remove a botched patch.

4.7.0 (2023-04-18)

• Updated PDFium from 5705 to 5715.

• Fixed PdfPage.remove_obj() wrongly retaining the page as parent in the finalizer hierarchy.

4.6.0 (2023-04-11)

• Updated PDFium from 5692 to 5705.

4.5.0 (2023-04-04)

• Updated PDFium from 5677 to 5692.

• In pdfium-binaries, forms init for V8/XFA enabled builds was fixed by correctly setting up XFA on library init (see pdfium-binaries#105). Updated pypdfium2’s support model accordingly.

4.4.0 (2023-03-28)

• Updated PDFium from 5664 to 5677.

4.3.0 (2023-03-21)

• Updated PDFium from 5648 to 5664.

• Fixed forms rendering in the multi-page renderer by initializing a formenv in worker jobs if the triggering document has one.

4.2.0 (2023-03-14)

• Updated PDFium from 5633 to 5648.

• API-breaking changes around forms code, necessary to fix conceptual issues. Closes #182.

  • may_init_forms parameter replaced with init_forms(), so that a custom form config can be provided.

  • formtype attribute replaced with get_formtype(). Previously, formtype would only be set correctly on formenv init, which caused confusion for documents that have forms but no formenv was initialized.

• PdfPage.get_*box() functions now provide an option to disable fallbacks. Closes #187.

• Some formerly hidden utilities are now exposed in the new namespace pypdfium2.internal.

4.1.0 (2023-03-07)

• Updated PDFium from 5619 to 5633.

• The PdfDocument parameter may_init_forms is now False by default.

4.0.0 (2023-02-28)

• Updated PDFium from 5579 to 5619.

• Full support model rewrite. Many existing features changed and new helpers added. Numerous bugs fixed on the way. Read the updated documentation to migrate your code.

• The raw API is now isolated in a separate namespace (pypdfium2.raw). Moreover, the raw API bindings do not implicitly encode strings anymore (pypdfium2 is now built with a patched version of ctypesgen by default).

• Helper objects now automatically resolve to the underlying raw object if used as ctypes function parameter.

• Overhauled the code base to use pathlib and f-strings.

• Updated wheel tags.

• Improved command-line interface, setup code, and documentation.

4.0.0b2 (2023-02-23)

• First successful beta release for v4.

4.0.0b1 (2023-02-22)

• Attempted beta release for v4. PyPI upload failed due to #177.

History

pypdfium2 is on PyPI since Dec 3, 2021. New versions have been released on a regular basis ever since.

There have been the following version ranges: 0.1 - 0.15, 1.0 - 1.11, 2.0 - 2.11, 3.0 - 3.21.1.

Entries for releases below version 4 have been removed from the changelog because they were too inconsistent.