yfedoseev/pdf_oxide v0.3.13

v0.3.13 | Character Extraction Quality, Multi-byte Encoding (Issue #186)

on GitHub

Bug Fixes — Character Extraction (#186)

Reported by @cole-dda — garbled output when using extract_chars() on PDFs with multi-byte encodings (CJK text, Type0 fonts).

• Multi-byte decoding in show_text — fixed extract_chars() to correctly handle 2-byte and variable-width encodings (Identity-H/V, Shift-JIS, etc.). Previously, characters were processed byte-by-byte, causing multi-byte characters to be split and garbled. Now uses the same robust decoding logic as extract_spans().
• Improved character positioning accuracy — replaced the 0.5em fixed-width estimate in show_text with actual glyph widths from the font dictionary. This ensures that character bounding boxes (bbox) and origins are precisely positioned, matching the actual PDF rendering.
• Accurate character advancement — character spacing (Tc) and word spacing (Tw) are now correctly scaled by horizontal scaling (Th) during character-level extraction, ensuring correct text matrix updates.

Community Contributors

Thank you to @cole-dda for identifying and reporting the character extraction quality issue with an excellent reproduction case (#186). Your report directly led to identifying the divergence between our high-level and low-level extraction paths, making extract_chars() significantly more robust for CJK and other multi-byte documents. We really appreciate your contribution to making PDF Oxide better!

Installation

Rust (crates.io)

cargo add pdf_oxide

Python (PyPI)

pip install pdf_oxide

JavaScript/WASM (npm)

npm install pdf-oxide-wasm

CLI (Homebrew)

brew install yfedoseev/tap/pdf-oxide

CLI (Scoop — Windows)

scoop bucket add pdf-oxide https://github.com/yfedoseev/scoop-pdf-oxide
scoop install pdf-oxide

CLI (Shell installer)

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yfedoseev/pdf_oxide/main/install.sh | sh

CLI (cargo-binstall)

cargo binstall pdf_oxide_cli

MCP Server (for AI assistants)

cargo install pdf_oxide_mcp

Pre-built Binaries
Download archives for Linux, macOS, and Windows from the assets below. Each archive includes both pdf-oxide (CLI) and pdf-oxide-mcp (MCP server).

Platform Support

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md for full details.