Can PyMUPDF works with chaquopy in Android Studio?

[nouman-x-ahmad]

Hi everyone,

I’m currently trying to integrate Python into an Android project using Chaquopy in Android Studio (version: Ladybug). While most Python libraries and code supported by Chaquopy work seamlessly, I’ve been running into issues when trying to integrate PyMuPDF.

Specifically, when I attempt to build my project with PyMuPDF, it fails with an error. To resolve this, I tried creating a .whl (wheel) file for PyMuPDF to integrate with the Android app, but I still encountered errors during the build process.

Here is the setup.py file I used to create the wheel:

from setuptools import setup, find_packages

setup(
    name='pdf',
    version='0.1.0',
    author='',
    author_email='',
    description='PDF to DOCX conversion library',
    long_description_content_type='text/markdown',
    packages=find_packages(where='src'),
    package_dir={'': 'src'},
    install_requires=[

        'PyMuPDF',

    ],
    classifiers=[
        'Programming Language :: Python :: 3',
        'License :: OSI Approved :: MIT License',
        'Operating System :: OS Independent',
    ],
    python_requires='>=3.7',
    platforms=['Android', 'Linux', 'macOS', 'Windows']
)

In Build Gradle app

chaquopy {

    productFlavors {


        getByName("py310") { version = "3.10" }
        getByName("py311") { version = "3.11" }

    }

    defaultConfig {

        buildPython("C:\\Users\\AppData\\Local\\Programs\\Python\\Python312\\python.exe")
         pip {
                   install ("PyMuPDF") // if i use this it doesn't work
                   install ("pdf-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl") // if i try to install whl file that has PyMuPDF it doesn't work too
         }
     }
}      

**when try to install package directly using install ("PyMuPDF") **
Failed to install PyMuPDF from https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/40/fc/dd8776dc5c2f8cf0e51cf81a5f1de3840996bed7ca03ec768b0733024fb9/pymupdf-1.25.2.tar.gz#sha256=9ea88ff1b3ccb359620f106a6fd5ba6877d959d21d78272052c3496ceede6eec.

And same case when using Whl file install ("pdf-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl")

Failed to install PyMuPDF from https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/40/fc/dd8776dc5c2f8cf0e51cf81a5f1de3840996bed7ca03ec768b0733024fb9/pymupdf-1.25.2.tar.gz#sha256=9ea88ff1b3ccb359620f106a6fd5ba6877d959d21d78272052c3496ceede6eec (from pdf==0.1.0).

Questions:

• Has anyone successfully integrated PyMuPDF with Chaquopy on Android?
• Are there specific steps or modifications required to get this working?
• Could there be an issue with how I’ve structured the setup.py file?
• Are there any alternative to Chaquopy sdk that supports PyMuPDF

Any insights or guidance would be greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance for your help.

[julian-smith-artifex-com]

PyMuPDF is not a pure Python package, it uses the powerful PDF C library MuPDF, with additional C++ and Python code auto-generated using the libclang parser and SWIG, which is used by the top-level hand-written Python and C++ code that provides the PyMuPDF API. The resulting wheel/installation has various dynamic libraries and Python code that are all carefully arranged to work together at runtime.

There is absolutely not point in trying to write your own setup.py. PyMuPDF already comes with a setup.py that manages the quite complicated task of building the various components. It is known to work, and is regularly tested, on Windows, Linux (x64 and aarch64) and MacOS (x64 and arm64).

I'm afraid that i don't know whether it is practical to get PyMuPDF's setup.py to work on Android. It would require, amongst other things, that Android supports compiling+linking of MuPDF, has Python packages libclang and swig, and has a C++ compiler equivalent to g++ or clang++.

I hope that all makes sense.