Install

pip install pdfmux

That handles digital PDFs. For any real-world batch, install pdfmux[ocr] too — almost every directory of PDFs has at least one scan, and without OCR those pages return empty text:

pip install "pdfmux[ocr]"             # ⭐ recommended — RapidOCR for scanned pages (~200MB, CPU)

Other backends, by document type:

pip install "pdfmux[tables]"          # Docling — table-heavy docs (~500MB)
pip install "pdfmux[opendataloader]"  # OpenDataLoader — complex layouts (Java 11+)
pip install "pdfmux[marker]"          # Marker — neural extraction for academic papers
pip install "pdfmux[llm]"             # Gemini fallback (default LLM)
pip install "pdfmux[llm-claude]"      # Claude (Sonnet / Opus)
pip install "pdfmux[llm-openai]"      # GPT-4o family
pip install "pdfmux[llm-ollama]"      # Ollama (any local model)
pip install "pdfmux[llm-mistral]"     # Mistral OCR API ($0.002/page)
pip install "pdfmux[llm-all]"         # all LLM providers (incl. Gemma 4 via Gemini key)
pip install "pdfmux[watch]"           # `pdfmux watch <dir>` auto-convert on change
pip install "pdfmux[all]"             # everything

Requires Python 3.11+.

---

cost-aware extraction with budget cap

pdfmux convert report.pdf --mode economy --budget 0.50

---

predict cost before running anything

pdfmux estimate big-report.pdf --llm-provider gemini

---

│ Extractor │ Status │ Version │ Install │

---

│ Docling │ missing │ -- │ pip install pdfmux[tables] │

---

│ Surya │ missing │ -- │ pip install pdfmux[ocr-heavy] │

---

{"event":"classified","page_count":312,"plan":"pymupdf+gemini-fallback"}

---

Default install — already includes python-bidi for RTL reordering

pip install pdfmux

---

Cost Modes

Mode	Behavior	Typical cost
economy	Rule-based backends only. No LLM calls.	$0/page
balanced	LLM only for pages that fail rule-based extraction.	~$0.002/page avg
premium	LLM on every page for maximum quality.	~$0.01/page

Set a hard budget cap: --budget 0.50 stops LLM calls when spend reaches $0.50 per document.