# What changed in pypdfium2

> 22 changes in pypdfium2 5 from its official release notes, upgrade guides and advisories: 4 breaking, 1 deprecations, 9 new APIs and options. Each one cited. Sources checked 2026-10-20. HTML: https://unstale.sh/pypi/pypdfium2/

To see which of these apply to a repository, run `npx @unstale/cli init` in it.

## pypdfium2 5

### Breaking changes

- Module splitting through PYPDFIUM_MODULES={raw,helpers} is dropped; downstream packagers needing module splitting are advised to patch the project name and module include rules. (5.14.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/pypdfium2-team/pypdfium2/releases/tag/5.14.0)
- The project no longer provides its own conda packaging; the notes say pypdfium2 can instead be installed from PyPI in a conda environment. (5.14.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/pypdfium2-team/pypdfium2/releases/tag/5.14.0)
- The system-generate target is dropped. (5.14.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/pypdfium2-team/pypdfium2/releases/tag/5.14.0)
- Python versions below 3.8 are broken, so developers need Python 3.8 or newer. (5.13.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/pypdfium2-team/pypdfium2/releases/tag/5.13.0)

### Deprecations

- Closing foreign bitmaps now warns that the operation may be unsafe because it frees the C-side buffer. (5.14.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/pypdfium2-team/pypdfium2/releases/tag/5.14.0)

### New APIs and options

- Adds an API to read attachment descriptions. (5.14.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/pypdfium2-team/pypdfium2/releases/tag/5.14.0)
- Adds an API to obtain an attachment's MIME type. (5.14.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/pypdfium2-team/pypdfium2/releases/tag/5.14.0)
- Adds an API to write attachment descriptions. (5.14.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/pypdfium2-team/pypdfium2/releases/tag/5.14.0)
- Set warn_on_close to False to silence the warning when you have made sure closing a foreign bitmap is safe. (5.14.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/pypdfium2-team/pypdfium2/releases/tag/5.14.0)
- Adds an API to retrieve bookmark style. (5.14.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/pypdfium2-team/pypdfium2/releases/tag/5.14.0)
- Adds the PdfBookmarkStyle binding. (5.14.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/pypdfium2-team/pypdfium2/releases/tag/5.14.0)
- PDFium adds APIs to read and write attachment descriptions. (5.13.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/pypdfium2-team/pypdfium2/releases/tag/5.13.0)
- The public FormFill API exposes SetTextDirection, allowing integrations to set text direction. (5.13.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/pypdfium2-team/pypdfium2/releases/tag/5.13.0)
- Experimental Pyodide build support was added. Builds are flaky, may crash or freeze on shutdown, and are available for download from GitHub but not PyPI. (5.13.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/pypdfium2-team/pypdfium2/releases/tag/5.13.0)

### Fixes and other changes

- For PdfDocument and PdfImage.load_jpeg(), a short readinto() now indicates an error when it reads fewer bytes than the buffer size. (5.14.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/pypdfium2-team/pypdfium2/releases/tag/5.14.0)
- Closing or finalizing a bitmap now always calls FPDFBitmap_Destroy(), including for bitmaps created from a native, pdfium-external buffer. (5.14.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/pypdfium2-team/pypdfium2/releases/tag/5.14.0)
- Fixes an off-by-one error that chopped one byte too much from the document identifier. (5.14.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/pypdfium2-team/pypdfium2/releases/tag/5.14.0)
- Windows spoof headers are now included in source distributions, preventing subtly incorrect bindings when installing from an sdist on Windows. (5.13.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/pypdfium2-team/pypdfium2/releases/tag/5.13.0)
- pdfium-binaries builds are now available for mipsle, expanding the architectures developers can use. (5.13.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/pypdfium2-team/pypdfium2/releases/tag/5.13.0)
- Runtime support and source installation compatibility with Python 3.6 and 3.7 were fixed; ctypesgen continues to require Python >=3.8. (5.13.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/pypdfium2-team/pypdfium2/releases/tag/5.13.0)
- PDFium partially fixes RTL character and line reading order in CPDF_TextPage, affecting text extraction from PDFs. (5.13.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/pypdfium2-team/pypdfium2/releases/tag/5.13.0)
- Fixes a missing mkdir call, particularly for the PDFIUM_PLATFORM=system-search / fallback setup. (5.12.1) — [release notes](https://github.com/pypdfium2-team/pypdfium2/releases/tag/5.12.1)