How to create PDF files in Python [closed]

Question

Here is my experience after following the hints on this page.

1. pyPDF can't embed images into files. It can only split and merge. (Source: Ctrl+F through its documentation page) Which is great, but not if you have images that are not already embedded in a PDF.

2. pyPDF2 doesn't seem to have any extra documentation on top of pyPDF.

3. ReportLab is very extensive. (Userguide) However, with a bit of Ctrl+F and grepping through its source, I got this:

   • First, download the Windows installer and source

   • Then try this on Python command line:

     from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas
     from reportlab.lib.units import inch, cm
     c = canvas.Canvas('ex.pdf')
     c.drawImage('ar.jpg', 0, 0, 10*cm, 10*cm)
     c.showPage()
     c.save()
     

All I needed is to get a bunch of images into a PDF, so that I can check how they look and print them. The above is sufficient to achieve that goal.

ReportLab is great, but would benefit from including helloworlds like the above prominently in its documentation.

I suggest pyPdf. It works really nice. I also wrote a blog post some while ago, you can find it here.

I suggest Pdfkit. (installation guide)

It creates pdf from html files. I chose it to create pdf in 2 steps from my Python Pyramid stack:

1. Rendering server-side with mako templates with the style and markup you want for you pdf document
2. Executing pdfkit.from_string(...) method by passing the rendered html as parameter

This way you get a pdf document with styling and images supported.

You can install it as follows :

• using pip

  pip install pdfkit

• You will also need to install wkhtmltopdf (on Ubuntu).

You can try this(Python-for-PDF-Generation) or you can try PyQt, which has support for printing to pdf.

Python for PDF Generation

The Portable Document Format (PDF) lets you create documents that look exactly the same on every platform. Sometimes a PDF document needs to be generated dynamically, however, and that can be quite a challenge. Fortunately, there are libraries that can help. This article examines one of those for Python.

Read more at http://www.devshed.com/c/a/Python/Python-for-PDF-Generation/#whoCFCPh3TAks368.99

Here is a solution that works with only the standard packages. matplotlib has a PDF backend to save figures to PDF. You can create a figures with subplots, where each subplot is one of your images. You have full freedom to mess with the figure: Adding titles, play with position, etc. Once your figure is done, save to PDF. Each call to savefig will create another page of PDF.

Example below plots 2 images side-by-side, on page 1 and page 2.

from matplotlib.backends.backend_pdf import PdfPages
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from scipy.misc import imread
import os
import numpy as np

files = [ "Column0_Line16.jpg", "Column0_Line47.jpg" ]
def plotImage(f):
    folder = "C:/temp/"
    im = imread(os.path.join(folder, f)).astype(np.float32) / 255
    plt.imshow(im)
    a = plt.gca()
    a.get_xaxis().set_visible(False) # We don't need axis ticks
    a.get_yaxis().set_visible(False)

pp = PdfPages("c:/temp/page1.pdf")
plt.subplot(121)
plotImage(files[0])
plt.subplot(122)
plotImage(files[1])
pp.savefig(plt.gcf()) # This generates page 1
pp.savefig(plt.gcf()) # This generates page 2
pp.close()

fpdf is python (too). And often used. See PyPI / pip search. But maybe it was renamed from pyfpdf to fpdf. From features: PNG, GIF and JPG support (including transparency and alpha channel)