PyMuPDF4LLM: Your All-in-One Multi-Format Document Converter for RAG and LLM Workflows

By /

PyMuPDF4LLM is a fantastic tool that makes it super easy to extract text and other information from a variety of file types. It’s especially handy if you’re working on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems or Large Language Model (LLM) pipelines. Why? Because it converts so many popular file formats directly to Markdown (MD) — and we all know Markdown is widely well understood by LLMs

Why PyMuPDF4LLM for RAG and LLM?


PyMuPDF4LLM supports a range of input types, including (but not limited to):

  • PDF
  • doc / docx
  • ppt / pptx
  • xls / xlsx
  • XPS / OpenXPS
  • CBZ (Comic Book Archives)
  • ePUB
  • Plain Text Files

Being able to handle all these formats means that, instead of installing, maintaining and coding for multiple libraries, for each document type, you can rely on a single package. If you’re building a RAG that needs to “read”  content from a wide variety of files, that’s a major plus!

From opening files to extracting text, tables and images, PyMuPDF4LLM in my test has always performed very wellis consistently reported as smooth, reliable, and efficient.

Quick Example in Python

Below is a small code snippet to show just how straightforward it is to open and process a document using PyMuPDF4LLM, at the time of writing, I’m using PyMuPDF==1.23.12:

!pip install pymupdf4llm  # or simply install via pip in your environment

import pymupdf4llm

# Example file path - can be PDF, XPS, ePUB, etc.
file_path = "example.pdf"

# Convert the document to Markdown
markdown_output = pymupdf4llm.to_markdown(pdf_path)

# Print or process the Markdown text
print(markdown_output)

# Optionally, save to a file
with open("output.md", "w", encoding="utf-8") as md_file:
    md_file.write(markdown_output)

With a few lines of code, we’ve opened a document, converted it to Markdown, and saved it for further processing.

Conclusion

I’ve tested various documents in different formats, and PyMuPDF4LLM consistently stands out. A few line of code and the document is converted in MD.
A Note about licensing, looks like a bit complicated between PyMuPDF4LLM and PyMuPDF, make sure to review it before using the tool in production. Happy coding! 😄

Scroll to Top