#99th of 13 in Data and scraping for AI
pdfmathtranslate
Translates scientific PDFs while keeping formulas, figures and layout intact
Live demo ↗
(opens in a new tab)Documentation ↗
(opens in a new tab)Repository on GitHub ↗
(opens in a new tab)
- Stars
- 37.6k
- License
- AGPL-3.0
- Last commit
- Oct 2026
- Last release
- Jul 2025
- Language
- Python
31,933 on 25 Mar 202637,554 on 14 Oct 2026
From GitHub's daily star counts.
Checked on GitHub.
Overview
pdf2zh translates scientific PDFs and writes a translated-only and a bilingual (dual) PDF, preserving formulas, charts, table of contents and annotations. It runs as a CLI, a Gradio web UI on port 7860, a Python or HTTP API, or an MCP server, and calls a configurable translation service (Google by default). Layout detection uses a DocLayout-YOLO ONNX model, with optional OCR and an --ultrafast mode.
Who it is for: Researchers and self-hosters translating academic PDFs
Strengths
- Outputs both translated-only and side-by-side bilingual PDFs from one command
- Many interfaces: CLI, Gradio GUI, Docker, Python API, HTTP API, MCP stdio/SSE
- Selectable translation backends via -s, with Google as the default
- Optional OCR for scanned pages and --ultrafast mode for native-text PDFs
Weaknesses
- Python limited to 3.11 to 3.12
- OCR is experimental and targets white-background scans; handwriting may fail
- Last release is 2025-07-11; v2 work lives in a separate PDFMathTranslate-next repo
- --ultrafast is CLI fast mode only and is weaker on complex tables or formulas
What it needs
- no GPU
- Docker + Compose
- Needs DocLayout-YOLO ONNX model (Hugging Face download), Translation service (Google default, others configurable)
- Models: ONNX
- port 7860
Also in Data and scraping for AI
See all 13| Rank | Project | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | mineruDocument parser that converts PDFs, images and Office files to Markdown and JSON | 78 out of 100 |
| 2 | Crawl4AIPython web crawler that converts pages to LLM-ready Markdown and JSON | 77 out of 100 |
| 3 | doclingPython library and CLI that converts PDFs, Office files and more into structured text | 76 out of 100 |
| #4 | markitdownPython tool that converts PDF, Office, HTML and audio files to Markdown for LLMs | 71 out of 100 |
| #5 | FirecrawlWeb scraping and crawling API that returns LLM-ready markdown | 67 out of 100 |