Python API Usage - PdfItDown Docs

The pdfitdown Python package provides a native interface to the Rust PdfItDown engine via PyO3 and Maturin.

Installation

uv add pdfitdown

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/AstraBert/PdfItDown.git
cd PdfItDown/crates/pdfitdown-python
maturin build --release
uv pip install target/wheels/pdfitdown-*.whl

Supported Formats

Category	Formats
Markup	`.md`, `.html`, `.htm`
Office	`.docx`, `.xlsx`, `.pptx`
Images	`.png`, `.jpg`, `.jpeg`, `.webp`, `.tiff`, `.avif`
Text	`.txt`, `.csv`, `.xml`, `.json`, and more
Other	`.pdf` (pass-through)

CLI

The package installs a pdfitdown CLI entry point:

# Single file
pdfitdown -i README.md -o README.pdf

# Multiple files
pdfitdown -i file1.png -i file2.docx -o out1.pdf -o out2.pdf

# Bulk directory conversion
pdfitdown -d ./documents --recursive

Python API

Import the Converter class from pdfitdown.pdfconversion:

from pdfitdown.pdfconversion import Converter

converter = Converter()

Convert a single file

result = converter.convert("README.md", "README.pdf", overwrite=False)

Convert multiple files

results = converter.multiple_convert(
    ["business.md", "report.docx"],
    ["business.pdf", "report.pdf"],
    overwrite=True
)

If you omit output_paths, PDFs are written next to the inputs with .pdf extension.

Convert a directory

results = converter.convert_directory("docs/", overwrite=True, recursive=True)

Returns a list of generated PDF paths.

Error handling

All methods raise standard Python exceptions on failure (e.g. IOError when an output file exists and overwrite=False).

​Installation

​Supported Formats

​CLI

​Python API

​Convert a single file

​Convert multiple files

​Convert a directory

​Error handling