Home Download Manual Forum
Ctrl + K to search...
SumatraPDF documentation
/
SumatraPDF run
md
Available in pre-release 3.7
Usage: SumatraPDF run script.js [arguments...]
run executes a MuPDF JavaScript program. It’s the same scripting engine as mutool run and gives you programmatic access to PDF (and other) documents: read and edit pages, annotations, metadata, render to images, extract text and more.

Run a script #

SumatraPDF run script.js runs the program in script.js.
A minimal hello.js:
print("hello from SumatraPDF run");

SumatraPDF run hello.js

Open a document #

The MuPDF API is available to scripts. For example, pages.js prints the number of pages of a document:
var doc = Document.openDocument(scriptArgs[0]);
print(doc.countPages() + " pages");

SumatraPDF run pages.js file.pdf

Script arguments #

When you run SumatraPDF run script.js a b c, the script can read the arguments that follow the script name:
  • scriptPath - path of the script (script.js)
  • scriptArgs - array of the arguments after the script (["a", "b", "c"])
  • process.argv - Node-compatible array of all arguments, including the program name and script path

Interactive mode (REPL) #

Run SumatraPDF run with no script to start an interactive read-eval-print loop. It prints a > prompt, evaluates each line you type and prints the result:
SumatraPDF run
> 1 + 2
3
> var doc = Document.openDocument("file.pdf")
> doc.countPages()
21
Press Ctrl + Z then Enter (end of input) to quit, or call quit().

Reading from stdin #

readline() reads a line from standard input, so scripts can be driven by piped or typed input (added in 3.7, issue #5665).
echo.js:
var line = readline();
print("you typed: " + line);

echo hello | SumatraPDF run echo.js
The interactive REPL also reads from stdin, so you can pipe a whole program into it:
echo "print(6*7)" | SumatraPDF run

Built-in functions #

In addition to the MuPDF API, these global functions are available:
  • print(...) - print arguments followed by a newline
  • write(...) - print arguments without a trailing newline
  • read(filename) - read a file and return its contents as a string
  • readline() - read one line from standard input
  • repr(value) - return a string representation of a value
  • load(filename) - load and execute another script file
  • gc() - run the garbage collector
  • quit(code) - exit the program

MuPDF JavaScript API #

The objects used above (Document, Page, Pixmap, PDFDocument, Buffer etc.) are the MuPDF scripting API. SumatraPDF run is the same as mutool run. See the upstream documentation:
SumatraPDF documentation
/
SumatraPDF run
md