# PDFx - Extract references and metadata from PDF documents, and download all referenced PDFs

DevFeed: [PDFx - Extract references and metadata from PDF documents, and download all referenced PDFs](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/pdfx-extract-references-and-metadata-from-pdf-documents-and-download-all-referenced-pdfs-31874.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://www.metachris.dev/pdfx/>)

Author: Chris Hager

Published: 2026-09-17T02:48:44.791916Z

Content type: tutorial

Language: en

Sources: [Chris Hager](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/chris-hager.md>)

Topics: [pdf](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/pdf.md>), [Python](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/python.md>), [Command-line interface](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/cli.md>), [JSON](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/json.md>), [pip](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/pip.md>), [Open Source](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/open-source.md>), [GitHub](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/github.md>)

Tags: [apache](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/apache.md>), [broken-links](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/broken-links.md>), [command-line](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/command-line.md>), [download](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/download.md>), [github](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/github.md>), [install](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/install.md>), [json](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/json.md>), [library](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/library.md>), [open-source](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/open-source.md>), [pdf](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/pdf.md>), [python](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/python.md>)

## AI overview

PDFx is an Apache-licensed open-source tool that extracts references and metadata from PDF documents. It detects PDF, URL, arXiv, and DOI references, can download referenced PDFs in parallel, identify broken hyperlinks, extract PDF text, and output results as text or JSON. It is available as a command-line tool and Python package, with support for local and online PDFs.

## Source excerpt

Reading over this paper and its references recently, I thought it would be great to be able to download all the references at once... This inspired me to write a little tool to do just that, and now it's done and released under the Apache open source license: https://github.com/metachris/pdfx Features Extract references and metadata from a given PDF Detects pdf, url, arxiv and doi references Fast, parallel download of all referenced PDFs Find broken hyperlinks (using the -c flag) (more) Output as text or JSON (using the -j flag) Extract the PDF text (using the --text flag) Use as command-line tool or Python package Compatible with Python 2 and 3 Works with local and online pdfs Getting Started Grab a copy of pdfx with easy_install or pip and run it: