mutool

mutool

Inspect, convert and manipulate PDF files, from MuPDF.

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

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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Inspect, convert and manipulate PDF files, from MuPDF.

mutool merges and splits documents, extracts text and images, renders
pages to PNG, and rewrites and inspects PDF internals.

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 is the
full documentation.

Install

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

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

Which one is this?

This is the full build: every fallback font MuPDF ships, including
the per-language CJK faces. About 41 MB.

If you don’t work with CJK documents, mutool-lite is the same tool at
about 21 MB — the difference is entirely fonts. See its README for what
it drops.

Fallback fonts only matter for documents that don’t embed their own.
Most PDFs do embed them, and text extraction doesn’t depend on them at
all; rendering a document with unembedded text is where they earn their
place.

What isn’t included

Digital signature verification. MuPDF verifies PDF signatures
through OpenSSL, which would mean linking a library from outside the
base system — the one thing every package here avoids. mutool sign
still lists and clears signature fields; it cannot verify them. If you
need that, brew install mupdf is the honest answer.

OCR and barcodes. Upstream leaves Tesseract and zxing-cpp off by
default and so does this build. OCR in particular would mean bundling
Tesseract and Leptonica — a very large dependency for a feature that
belongs to a different tool.

The viewers. mupdf-gl and mupdf-x11 are GUI applications; only
the command-line tool is packaged.

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 correct for a
package manager sharing libraries across formulae, and 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.