Populating a PDF file - Python

Question

I have a ready-made PDF document containing placeholder values in certain areas.

e.g. {{ first_name }}, {{ postcode }}, ...

I need to substitute these values using python.

---

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

It's a somewhat strange way to go about things, as PDFs aren't really designed to be modified. Depending on how those PDFs you have were generated, it may be very hard to do any replacement. You cannot easily alter any formatting, including line breaks, so the only case this is really useful is if you have some sort of form so you know the fields will fit.

pyPdf may allow you to extract the text, but I don't see a function to alter it while writing a second PDF. PDFedit will certainly allow you to make changes, and is scriptable, but I don't know about connecting it to Python. ReportLab only reads PDFs in the plus version, if I'm reading the page Joe Kington linked right.

I would advise reviewing why you have templates in a PDF format, and if you really do need to make changes to them from that, take a look with PDFedit - there's no telling from this description what the structure of your documents are, and it might be very hard to locate the keywords.