PDFluent | Innovation Trigger BV

PDFluent gives you PDF parsing and extraction that runs inside your app, on your machine. It is for developers building RAG, agents and document automation. Turn PDFs into Markdown for your RAG pipeline, redact content or fill XFA forms. PDFluent 1.3.0 ranks above every engine on the published opendataloader-bench leaderboard (as of 3 November 2026)*.

*Overall score 0.9168 (quality="auto", keep_furniture=True, Linux) against the engines listed in the benchmark README on 3 November 2026; submitted as pull request #37 (https://github.com/opendataloader-project/opendataloader-bench/pull/37). Other engines have submissions open that are not yet on the leaderboard.

Why PDFluent

Leaderboard position

PDFluent 1.3.0 ranks above every engine on the published opendataloader-bench leaderboard (as of 3 November 2026)*.

Highest average, 19 measures

Highest average score across 19 extraction measures*, against Docling 2.126.0 and pymupdf4llm 1.28.2.

* Balanced tier with the table model (Preview), on our own held-out half of four public datasets, 17 October 2026: average 0.721 for PDFluent, 0.693 for pymupdf4llm, 0.672 for Docling. The table model was trained on the source datasets of two of them (PubTables-1M, FinTabNet) and most of those held-out pages are in their training split. On the 13 measures without that overlap the ranking is the same (0.650, 0.642, 0.610). Details: pdfluent.com/blog/sdk-1-2-0 and pdfluent.com/benchmarks. PyMuPDF and MuPDF are trademarks of Artifex Software, Inc. PDFluent is an independent product of Innovation Trigger B.V. and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Artifex.

Written in Rust

The SDK is written in Rust. The default build has no system libraries to install and nothing to bundle.

Rust build, redaction and XFA filling checked on SDK 1.2.0, 21 October 2026. Redaction describes the SDK, not the desktop editor. XFA filling was shown on a synthetic XFA form, not on real-world forms.

What you get

Extract text, headings, tables, lists and reading order for RAG and LLM pipelines.
Redact by removing content from the file, not covering it.
Fill XFA forms and flatten them to regular PDFs.
Use bindings for Python, Node, Rust, Java, .NET and WASM.
Edit PDFs with the free desktop editor, including for commercial use: no licence key, no trial, no tier and no subscription.

Use it in two lines

pip install pdfluent

import pdfluent; print(pdfluent.open("report.pdf").extract_markdown())

On Hugging Face

Formula recognition (ONNX): math formula images to LaTeX.
PDF heading level classifier: heading levels 1 to 3 for PDF to Markdown.
PDF document layout ground truth: annotated pages for evaluating document parsing.
Collection: PDFluent document AI

Licence in plain words

The PDFluent SDK and both models are licensed AGPL-3.0-only or the PDFluent Commercial Licence at your option. The document layout dataset annotations are CC BY 4.0 and free for commercial use with attribution. Details at https://pdfluent.com/license.

Start with PDFluent

Run pip install pdfluent, point it at your PDFs and see the Markdown it produces. The docs are at pdfluent.com/docs and the code at github.com/pdfluent/pdfluent-sdk is open for you to read.