Python PDF library

Question

What Python PDF libraries are there?

I need to make some PDF with many grids, and I'm looking for a library that allows to manage pages (multi-page). The library should calculate when the page is ended and then create the next page.

Maybe it could be rephrased to ask what libraries are suitable for generating appropriate PDFs for the askers use case. "The best" is too subjective. — Alpaca, May 21 '14 at 02:43
With respect to your second "question" (pagebreaks) you might want to use `pdflatex`. — Tobias Kienzler, Dec 02 '14 at 10:08
There is a nice tutorial, https://www.binpress.com/tutorial/manipulating-pdfs-with-python/167 that named some 5 libraries: pdfrw, slate, PDFQuery, PDFMiner, PyPDF2 — WebComer, Oct 08 '15 at 01:05
[xhtml2pdf](https://github.com/xhtml2pdf/xhtml2pdf) is based on html templates and uses ReportLab. It's quite fast to grab and it answers the OP needs. — Ehvince, Mar 19 '16 at 01:20
There's also [rinohtype](http://www.mos6581.org/rinohtype/), which is similar to LaTeX as it focuses on rendering structured documents. (full discloure: I am the author of rinohtype). — Brecht Machiels, Dec 22 '16 at 13:28
check the [pdfme](https://github.com/aFelipeSP/pdfme) library. It's very powerful — Felipe Sierra, Jul 14 '21 at 23:58

score 35 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 01 '14 at 08:22

35

The two that come to mind are:

edited Jul 01 '14 at 08:22

Eduard Luca

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answered Jun 20 '11 at 15:20

Bryan

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From reading pyPdf's documentation, it appears to manipulate existing PDFs. Is there a Python library that will print/convert to PDF? Thanks. – octopusgrabbus Aug 05 '11 at 15:46
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These libraries don't make PDFs. They just edit them. – monokrome Mar 05 '12 at 08:27
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Maybe, this Q&A can help - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1180115/add-text-to-existing-pdf-using-python – Wonil Dec 21 '12 at 06:16

score 33 · Answer 2 · edited Oct 29 '15 at 10:44

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Reportlab. There is an open source version, and a paid version which adds the Report Markup Language (an alternative method of defining your document).

edited Oct 29 '15 at 10:44

chhantyal

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answered Jun 20 '11 at 15:24

Rob Cowie

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Reportlab is really good. Another good one for simple tasks and for people who know about html is xhtml2pdf. – Loïc Sep 01 '15 at 19:40

Zardust · Answer 3 · 2016-11-22T09:07:49.983

5

I already have used Reportlab in one project.

edited Nov 22 '16 at 09:07

answered Jun 20 '11 at 15:24

Zardust

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score 3 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 07 '12 at 10:57

There is also http://appyframework.org/pod.html which takes a LibreOffice or OpenOffice document as template and can generate pdf, rtf, odt ... To generate pdf it requires a headless OOo on some server. Documentation is concise but relatively complete. http://appyframework.org/podWritingTemplates.html If you need advice, the author is rather helpful.

Python PDF library

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