# Artifex Software

> Artifex Software is a San Francisco-based developer of document processing and rendering technology best known for Ghostscript, the long-running PostScript and PDF interpreter, and the MuPDF and PyMuPDF families of PDF tools. Operating on a dual-license (open source plus commercial) model for more than three decades, Artifex supplies SDKs, APIs and SaaS that let developers render, convert, extract and manipulate PDF and PostScript documents. Its technology reaches an estimated one billion-plus deployments and is licensed by OEMs and technology companies worldwide; in recent years the company has extended its extraction tools toward AI and RAG/LLM pipelines with products like PyMuPDF4LLM.

- **Founded:** 1993
- **Headquarters:** San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founders:** L. Peter Deutsch (Creator of Ghostscript / Founder of Aladdin Enterprises)
- **Team size:** ~21 employees
- **Products:** Ghostscript, MuPDF, MuPDF.js, MuPDF.NET, PyMuPDF
- **Notable:** Ghostscript celebrated 35 years as a foundational open-source project, 1B+ deployments and 100M+ downloads across products, 40,000+ customers and 150+ OEM partners

## Products & services

- **Ghostscript** — An industry-standard PostScript and PDF interpreter with a rendering engine and graphics library, supporting PDF, PostScript, PCL and XPS rendering and conversion.
- **MuPDF** — A fast, lightweight, customizable PDF and XPS rendering and manipulation toolkit for developers, usable as a renderer, viewer or SDK.
- **MuPDF.js** — MuPDF built for JavaScript, running in the browser and Node.js.
- **MuPDF.NET** — MuPDF packaged for seamless integration in .NET applications via NuGet.
- **PyMuPDF** — High-performance Python bindings to read, extract and manipulate PDFs and other document formats.
- **PyMuPDF4LLM** — Extracts text and tables while preserving reading order and structure for RAG/LLM pipelines, running roughly 10x faster without a GPU.
- **PyMuPDF Pro** — Combines PyMuPDF and PyMuPDF4LLM with support for Office documents and HWP files.
- **SmartOffice** — A mobile document productivity suite for viewing, editing, creating and sharing MS Office and PDF documents (OEM/BYOD).
- **PDF.co** — Web APIs and no-code integrations (Zapier, n8n) for data extraction, parsing, conversion, form filling, merging/splitting and barcodes.
- **DocRaptor** — HTML-to-PDF conversion at scale, built on the Prince engine with a 99.99% uptime guarantee.

## Achievements

- Ghostscript celebrated 35 years as a foundational open-source project
- 1B+ deployments and 100M+ downloads across products
- 40,000+ customers and 150+ OEM partners
- 10,000+ GitHub stars and 200+ contributors across projects
- SOC 2 Type II compliant
- Pioneered a sustainable dual-license open-source business model over three decades

## Latest updates

- **2024-01** — Expanded the AI-focused toolkit with PyMuPDF4LLM and PyMuPDF Pro for RAG/LLM document extraction.
- **2024-01** — Released MuPDF.js and MuPDF.NET, bringing the MuPDF engine to JavaScript/Node.js and .NET environments.
- **2022-04** — Acquired by Seoul-based ePapyrus Inc.; Jeong Hee Kim became CEO of the combined company.

## Links

- Website: https://artifex.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/artifexsoftware
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/artifex
- GitHub: https://github.com/ArtifexSoftware

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/artifex-software
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-07-13