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Contributing

Thanks for wanting to improve PDF Text Extractor.

Local development

The app is a single-file PyQt6 + PyMuPDF Python script. The fastest iteration loop is:

chmod +x run.sh
./run.sh

run.sh installs PyMuPDF and PyQt6 into your current Python environment and launches pdf_text_extractor.py. You don't need to rebuild the .app while iterating — just re-run.

For a clean Python sandbox that won't pollute your system:

python3.12 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python pdf_text_extractor.py

Rebuilding the distributable .app

cd build_app
./build_app.sh

Output lands in dist/PDFTextExtractor.app. See the README for details on what the script does and how to ship the result.

Suggested improvements

  • OCR fallback for scanned PDFs (using tesseract / pytesseract) so users aren't stuck with "No extractable text found"
  • Universal2 build so a single .app runs on both Apple Silicon and Intel
  • Apple notarization in build_app.sh so clients skip the right-click → Open step
  • Multi-column / table extraction quality (PyMuPDF supports get_text("dict") for richer layouts)
  • Export to Markdown with preserved structure
  • Batch export — drop a folder, get a folder of .txt files
  • Windows / Linux builds via the same PyInstaller spec (small tweaks needed)

Pull request checklist

  • The app still launches and opens at least one digital PDF correctly
  • cd build_app && ./build_app.sh still produces a working dist/PDFTextExtractor.app
  • Update README.md if user-facing behavior changes
  • Update CHANGELOG.md with a one-line entry
  • Don't commit dist/, build_app/.venv/, build_app/build/, __pycache__/, or .DS_Store — these are gitignored