PDF Layout Reconstruction: Why Isn’t It Built Into PyMuPDF?

[Sat30-30]

I’m curious why PyMuPDF doesn’t offer a built-in feature to preserve the layout of a PDF in a text-based output, even though it provides precise coordinates for each word.

In our project, we needed layout-preserved text, so we used the coordinates of each word to recreate a 2D canvas with the original layout. While this works, it would be incredibly helpful if PyMuPDF offered a native way to export layout-preserved text.

Is there a specific reason why this hasn’t been included as a feature yet? Or is there an existing solution or community-recommended approach we might have missed?

Thanks in advance!

[JorjMcKie]

You have several options for this:

1. You can use the "html" output variant.
2. You can use the batch / CLI pymupdf module.
3. You can also use page.get_text(sort=True). This is an approximation of layout preservation only - but sufficient for many cases.

[Sat30-30]

get_text(sort=True) returns plain text sorted by positional coordinates, but it doesn't reliably preserve the visual layout. For layout-sensitive tasks—like extracting tables from PDFs using an LLM—we need structured output that accurately reflects the document's visual structure. Plain text alone lacks the spatial context.