srijanmukherjee/gomupdf

★ 16GoAudience · developerComplexity · 3/5Setup · moderate

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((gomupdf))
    Reading
      Extract all text
      Page by page
      Word positions
      Table detection
    Rendering
      Page to image
      Zoom level
      PNG export
      Text search
    Writing
      Create new PDFs
      Insert text and images
      Merge documents
      Encrypt and save
    Tech
      Go
      MuPDF C library
      CGo bindings

mindmap root((gomupdf)) Reading Extract all text Page by page Word positions Table detection Rendering Page to image Zoom level PNG export Text search Writing Create new PDFs Insert text and images Merge documents Encrypt and save Tech Go MuPDF C library CGo bindings

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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Extract all text from a PDF in Go with a single function call, preserving word positions for layout reconstruction.

USE CASE 2

Render any PDF page to a PNG image at a custom zoom level for thumbnail generation or document preview features.

USE CASE 3

Detect tables inside a PDF using either word-alignment inference or drawn grid lines, then process the data in Go.

USE CASE 4

Merge multiple PDF files, add metadata, and save the result with optional encryption in a Go backend service.

Tech stack

GoCMuPDFCGo

Getting it running

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 30min

Requires the MuPDF C library and development headers installed on your system before the Go package will build.

No license information was mentioned in the explanation.

In plain English

gomupdf is a Go library for working with PDF files and several other document formats. It provides a Go interface to MuPDF, a well-established C library that handles the actual file parsing and rendering. Developers using Go can add gomupdf to their projects to read text from PDFs, render pages as images, detect tables, and build or modify documents. Opening a file is a single function call. Once open, you can pull out all the text at once, or work page by page. The library preserves the position of each word and text fragment on the page, which matters when you need to reconstruct layout or identify columns. Table detection is built in and offers two approaches: one that infers table structure from word alignment, and one that follows drawn grid lines in the PDF. Rendering a page to an image is straightforward. You pass in a zoom level and get back a pixel buffer that you can save as PNG or use directly as a standard Go image type. Search works similarly, returning the coordinates of matching text so you can highlight or crop around results. On the writing side, you can create new PDFs from scratch, insert text and images into pages, merge documents, set metadata, and save with optional encryption. The API handles conversions too: you can open an EPUB or SVG file and convert it to a writable PDF. Installation requires the MuPDF C library and development headers to be present on your system, because the Go code calls into C. The README includes package manager commands for macOS, Debian, Fedora, and Arch Linux, and explains how to point the build at a custom installation location.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1

Show me how to open a PDF with gomupdf in Go, extract all text page by page, and print each page's content to stdout.

Prompt 2

Using gomupdf, render the first page of a PDF to a PNG file at 2x zoom. What code do I write and what does the pixel buffer return look like?

Prompt 3

I need to detect tables in a PDF using gomupdf. Walk me through both the word-alignment approach and the grid-line approach, and when to use each.

Prompt 4

How do I merge two PDF files into one using gomupdf and save the result with a password? Show the complete Go code.

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