Windows Binaries Installation

Since release 1.7 of PyMuPDF, we have been providing a "fast track" to install the software on Windows.

The main motivation for this was avoiding the requirement of having Visual Studio installed before you can use PyMuPDF. MS VS is no doubt an excellent product and the writer of these lines has more than one version installed and likes to use it!

These days, free VS versions are available, so costs is no longer an argument against VS as it surely was before.

But: VS also is a large product, both in terms of hardware requirements (e.g. several gigabytes of disk storage) and in terms of comprehending what I must do to achieve what I want.

So, our first idea was to provide the main object code of MuPDF produced by Visual Studio, which PyMuPDF requires. Essentially, this is just two lib files, libmupdf.lib and libthirdparty.lib with a total size of 21 MB. With these 2 files provided, a Windows user could perform a simple python setup step to get his version running. No Visual Studio required.

But: A working C / C++ compiler was still required to do this! And this compiler had to be compatible to the one that had produced the 2 libraries (under Visual Studio). The free version "MS Visual C++ for Python" did the job and it has a size of just a few hundred MB. The version of the underlying compiler is MSVC 9.0 (Msc v.1500). This is the same compiler used to build Python 2 and Python 3 up to 3.2 for Windows.

However, Microsoft unfortunately does no longer provide a similar small footprint version of higher compiler versions. So PyMuPDF users with Python versions 3.3 (Msc v.1600) and up (Python 3.4 = Msc v.1600, Python 3.5 = Msc v.1900) would again have to fall back to using Visual Studio in order to get our nice little software running - even with lib files provided.

In our opinion a clear overkill! We do not want that the installation of a giant IDE like Visual Studio stands in the way of using PyMuPDF.

Therefore, we are now offering a ready-compiled version of PyMuPDF. Its setup.py install no longer entails a compilation. No compiler, no Visual Studio, no MuPDF software are required.

You just need to unzip the less than 4.5 MB zip file suitable for your Python, run setup and be done 5 seconds later.

You obviously don't normally need the complete optional material repository (which is more than 50 MB large). If you click on a zip file in binary_setups you are being offered a "View Raw" option. If you click on this link, a download of just that zip file should be offered.

Starting with version 1.9, we also include binary download options on PyPI.

Currently, versions are available for Python 2.7 and Python 3.1 through 3.5 for 32bit and 64bit respectively. Please feel free to request more versions via the issue tracker.

Of course it is still possible to go the "traditional" way. If you do have Visual Studio, you can do that without any problem.