pypdf recently improved a lot. Depending on the data, it is on-par or better than pdfminer.six.

pymupdf / tika / PDFium are better than pypdf, but the difference became rather small - (mostly when to set a new line). The core part is that they are way faster. But they are not pure-Python which can mean that you cannot execute it. And some might have too restrictive licenses so that you may not use it.

Have a look at the benchmark. This benchmark mainly considers English texts, but also German ones. It does not include:

• Anything special regarding tables (just that the text is there, not about the formatting)
• Arabic test (RTL-languages)
• Mathematical formulas.

That means if your use-case requires those points, you might perceive the quality differently.

Having said that, the results from November 2022:

pypdf

I became the maintainer of pypdf and PyPDF2 in 2022! The community improved the text extraction a lot in 2022. Give it a try :-)

First, install it:

pip install pypdf

And then use it:

from pypdf import PdfReader

reader = PdfReader("example.pdf")
text = ""
for page in reader.pages:
    text += page.extract_text() + "\n"

Please note that those packages are not maintained:

• PyPDF2, PyPDF3, PyPDF4
• pdfminer (without .six)

pymupdf

import fitz # install using: pip install PyMuPDF

with fitz.open("my.pdf") as doc:
    text = ""
    for page in doc:
        text += page.get_text()

print(text)

Other PDF libraries

• pikepdf does not support text extraction (source)