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 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.

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

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

You just need to download the 4.2 MB zip file suitable for your Python, unzip it, run setup and you are done 5 seconds later.

Currently, versions are available for Python 2.7 and Python 3.1 through 3.5.

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