MuPDF is a portable C library for opening, manipulating and rendering documents in a variety of formats, including PDF, XPS, SVG, e-pub, and many common image formats.
This core C library provides an API (known as the MuPDF API) that allows a wide range of actions to be performed on those documents. The exact actions available depend on the format of the document, but always includes rendering of those files.
As well as this library, the MuPDF distribution includes various tools built on top of this API. These tools include simple viewers, tools to manipulate documents, to add, remove or resize pages, and to extract resources and other information from the documents. These tools are deliberately kept as ‘thin’ as possible. The heavy lifting is all performed by the core library, so as to be as reusable as possible.
Often the first place that people will encounter MuPDF is as a Linux or Android desktop viewer, but these are merely simple examples of applications built using some of the features of the library.
Finally, the MuPDF distribution includes bindings to reflect the MuPDF C API into other languages, such as C++, Python, Java and Javascript.