Getting Nougat to Play Nice with PDFs (The Manual Patch Method)

December 23, 2025 319 words 2 minutes

Contents

The nougat package has a pesky bug in how it handles PDFs. Don’t worry, it’s an easy fix! Here’s how to install it from the source and apply a manual patch, based on this pull request.

First, Make a Home for Your Project

mkdir -p /path/to/nougat
cd /path/to/nougat

Whip Up a Virtual Environment This keeps all the project’s Python bits neatly tucked away from the rest of your system.
python3 -m venv .venv source .venv/bin/activate
(If you’re a pyenv user, you can set a local Python version before you start.)
Install Nougat Straight from GitHub
pip3 install git+https://github.com/facebookresearch/nougat
Heads up: This can take a few minutes, especially on an older machine. Go grab a coffee!

Time for a Little Open-Source Surgery Alright, here comes the magic. We need to manually edit one of Nougat’s files to fix the PDF rendering.

Hunt down the file: Find and open `rasterize.py` inside your virtual environment. The path will look something like this: .venv/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages/nougat/utils/rasterize.py

Find this chunk of code:

# As pypdfium2 does not render pages at the document level rather it is done at the page level
renderer = pdf.render(
            pypdfium2.PdfBitmap.to_pil,
            page_indices=pages,
            scale=dpi / 72,
        )
for i, image in zip(pages, renderer):

Swap it out with this better version:

images = []
for idx in pages:
    page = pdf.get_page(idx)
    pil_image = page.render(
        scale=dpi / 72,
        rotation=0,
    ).to_pil()
    images.append(pil_image)
    page.close()
for i, image in zip(pages, images):

Take It for a Spin! With our patch in place, you’re ready to go.
- To run it while your venv is active:
  nougat --help
- To run it from anywhere, just use the full path:
  /path/to/nougat/.venv/bin/nougat --help
- And when you’re done, you can leave the virtual environment:
  deactivate

Full disclosure: I’ve actually switched to using marker for my own work. I find it way more powerful than nougat, and the best part is how lightweight and fast it is—it runs like a dream even on a CPU-only machine.