Way of "cleaning" a file without saving it

[dantard]

Hello again,
I was looking for a way to "clean" a pdf file in memory, that is, without saving it. I found this workaround but I am not sure it is the best way because sometimes is slow and additionally I found a problem with it:

document = pymupdf.open("file.pdf")
clean = document.tobytes(encryption=PDF_ENCRYPT_KEEP, deflate=True, garbage=3)
document = pymupdf.open("pdf", clean)

The problem is that with this file, that I randomly found online, the tobytes gets stuck. Not sure it is the only file with which this would happen.

Thanks in advance.

[JorjMcKie]

Your approach is correct!
If you want to compress, always look at all the details. For example using object streams compression may in fact take longer if the PDF is large and did not use them before.
The more compression you want / request, the higher the chance that things take longer - not a surprise really, is it?
That example file indeed has problems - but they are not related to the .tobytes() method: also occurs when using save.