mutool-lite

mutool-lite

The same PDF tool as mutool, at half the size without the per-language CJK fonts.

curl -fsSL https://unflab.app/get | sh -s -- mutool-lite

Installs to ~/.local/bin. Add --prefix /usr/local/bin to
put it somewhere else, or --uninstall to remove it.

Why it’s here

Escapes a dependency tree: Homebrew’s build pulls in libraries this tool never touches at run time.

Details

Built from that exact tarball, with its SHA-256 pinned in the
recipe. The binary links against nothing outside /usr/lib
and /System/, checked in CI before release.

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The same PDF tool as mutool, at half the size without the per-language CJK fonts.

Same source, same version, same subcommands — it just embeds fewer
fallback fonts, so it is about 21 MB rather than 41 MB.

mutool draw -o page.png doc.pdf 1        # render page 1
mutool draw -F txt doc.pdf               # extract text
mutool merge -o out.pdf a.pdf b.pdf      # merge
mutool pages doc.pdf                     # page dimensions
mutool extract doc.pdf                   # pull out fonts and images
mutool clean -d doc.pdf out.pdf          # rewrite, decompressing streams
mutool info doc.pdf                      # fonts, images, page count

mutool with no arguments lists every subcommand; man mutool-lite is
the full documentation.

Install

./install.sh                      # into ~/.local/bin
./install.sh --prefix /usr/local/bin
./install.sh --uninstall

The binary installs as mutool-lite, and mutool is added as a symlink
if nothing else on your machine already answers to that name.

What’s different

Every byte of the difference is fonts. The code is identical.

MuPDF embeds fallback fonts for text a PDF doesn’t carry its own copy
of. This build drops three sets:

CJK text still renders: DroidSansFallback is kept, and it covers the
CJK range. What’s lost is per-language correctness — the same
character is drawn differently in Japanese, Chinese and Korean
typography, and this build can only draw it one way.

Kept in both builds: the Base 14 PDF fonts (upstream warns that
dropping them makes PDF “unusable”) and Charis SIL for EPUB and HTML
(dropping it makes EPUB “ugly”).

None of this affects text extraction, merging, splitting, or any
document that embeds its own fonts — which is most of them. It only
shows up when rendering a document whose fonts aren’t included in the
file.

If you work with CJK documents regularly, install mutool instead.

What isn’t included

Everything under this heading in mutool’s README applies here too:
no PDF signature verification (that needs OpenSSL), no OCR or
barcodes (off upstream by default), and no GUI viewers.

About this build

One binary, linked against nothing but macOS’s own libSystem.

MuPDF vendors its dependencies — FreeType, HarfBuzz, jbig2dec, libjpeg,
OpenJPEG, lcms2, zlib, brotli, gumbo and MuJS all live in the source
tree and are built from it. Homebrew’s formula deletes those bundled
copies and links system libraries instead, which is why
brew install mupdf brings a dozen dependencies. This build just lets
MuPDF build the way it ships.

Upstream

• Home: https://mupdf.com/
• Docs: https://mupdf.readthedocs.io/
• Source: https://git.ghostscript.com/?p=mupdf.git
• Version: 1.28.3
• Licence: AGPL-3.0-or-later (see LICENSE)

MuPDF is Artifex Software’s work. unflab only compiles and packages it.

The AGPL requires that the source for this binary be available: it is
the tarball recorded in .unflab/provenance, with its SHA-256, exactly
as fetched. This build additionally sets -DTOFU_CJK_LANG -DTOFU_HISTORIC -DTOFU_SYMBOL, which is recorded in the recipe.