PDFalcon

A pythonic PDF management library (and falcons are cool)

Examples

Writing a new pdf:

from pdfalcon.pdf import PdfFile
pdf = PdfFile()
page = pdf.add_page()
quote = '"Just as sight recognizes darkness by the experience of not seeing, '
    'so imagination recognizes the infinite by not understanding it" - Proclus'
text = page.add_text(quote, size=40, line_size=42, translate_x=150)

with open('/tmp/test.pdf', 'wb') as f:
    pdf.write(f)

Parsing a pdf:

from pdfalcon.pdf import PdfFile
with open('/tmp/test.pdf', 'rb') as f:
    pdf = PdfFile.read(f)

Tips

To test/view in linux:

qpdfview /tmp/test.pdf

Planned

• support inline image object
• support color operators
• support shade object
• support special stream whitespace
• support more stream filters
• support object stream
• support annotations
• support outline
• support comments
• validate parser behavior with example PDFs (PDF spec doc)
• element-based testing framework
• improve errors / document validation
• add date parsing
• add more shapes
• add more text formatting options
  • line wrapping
  • content shrinking
  • more fonts
• add methods to extract text/images from pdf + pages
• expand unit testing
• add remaining page layout options
• documentation
• icon (multidirectional F with falcon outline)
• support security
• support encryption

Expansion

• define common API spec for file formats, used for conversion support
• define common storage format for file components which can be the basis of a file generation tool

Futurism

• ability to define new file formats quickly such that they are immediately accepted by standards-conforming tooling