# Zpdf

8 Hacker News commenters recommended Zpdf and 6 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 1 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Fast PDF text extraction library in Zig, reported several times faster than MuPDF and MIT licensed. Critics say it is vibe coded, untested, and crashes on some files.

## Why people recommend it

- Much faster than MuPDF (4 comments): "5x speed improvements on pdf text extraction might be great for some applications" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46438606)) "Impressive performance gains! 5x faster than MuPDF is significant" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46441136)) "significantly faster than MuPDF for text extraction workloads" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46437289))

## What people warn about

- Vibe coded, untested code concerns (6 comments): "I would worry about its longevity as a vibe coded project" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46438718)) "I'm not convinced that projects vibe coded over the evening deserve the HN front page" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46438549)) "it looka like the author didn't even test the AI output on real PDF" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46444224))
- Crashes and memory errors (2 comments): "I tried a small PDF and got a memory error." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46439549)) "it segfaults on every single one" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46439149))
- Messy output, spacing problems (2 comments): "Is indeed faster but output is messier. And doesn't handle Unicode in contrast to mutool that does." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46439097)) "The spacing issue isn't working quite right yet." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46443559))
- Benefit over MuPDF questioned (2 comments): "I think it's fair to say it's not “legitimately useful” except as a way for the author to fill his resume" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46442226)) "Couldn't the cycles have just been spent on trying to make muPDF better?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46440109))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Tesseract OCR](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tesseract.md): 32 recommend
- [Docling](https://hackerapproved.com/p/docling.md): 19 recommend
- [Mozilla Readability](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mozilla-readability.md): 10 recommend
- [MarkItDown by Microsoft](https://hackerapproved.com/p/markitdown.md): 7 recommend
- [Azure Document Intelligence](https://hackerapproved.com/p/azure-document-intelligence.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Zpdf", https://hackerapproved.com/p/zpdf/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).