Question 1

What is the fastest Python PDF library?

Accepted Answer

PDF Oxide is the fastest Python PDF library, with 0.8ms mean text extraction time — 5.8× faster than PyMuPDF (4.6ms) and 15× faster than pypdf (12.1ms). Benchmarked on 3,830 real-world PDFs with 100% pass rate.

Question 2

Is PDF Oxide free for commercial use?

Accepted Answer

Yes. PDF Oxide is MIT licensed — free for all uses including commercial products, SaaS, and proprietary software. No license fees, no sales calls, no AGPL restrictions.

Question 3

Can PDF Oxide handle scanned PDFs with OCR?

Accepted Answer

Yes. PDF Oxide includes built-in OCR via PaddleOCR and ONNX Runtime. No Tesseract installation needed — just pip install pdf_oxide and use extract_text_ocr(). Supports PP-OCRv3, v4, and v5 models.

Question 4

Does PDF Oxide support XFA forms?

Accepted Answer

Yes. PDF Oxide is the only Python PDF library that can detect, analyze, and extract data from XFA forms (XML Forms Architecture). PyMuPDF, pypdf, pdfplumber, and pdfminer cannot read XFA form data.

Question 5

How does PDF Oxide compare to PyMuPDF?

Accepted Answer

PDF Oxide is 5.8× faster than PyMuPDF (0.8ms vs 4.6ms mean), has a 100% pass rate vs 99.3%, and is MIT licensed vs PyMuPDF's AGPL-3.0. PDF Oxide also has built-in Markdown/HTML output and XFA form support that PyMuPDF lacks.

Question 6

Can PDF Oxide convert PDF to Markdown?

Accepted Answer

Yes. PDF Oxide has built-in PDF to Markdown conversion with heading detection, table preservation, and list formatting — ideal for LLM and RAG pipelines. No separate package needed, unlike PyMuPDF which requires pymupdf4llm (69× slower).