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How can I place a pdf asset into a empty PDF page?

I have multiple PDF files with small sizes (e.g. 3cm x 2 cm) exported from Adobe Indesign.
I want to compose many of these into one new PDF which has the size of a whole page.
The small PDFs contain a plotter line in a special color which would get lost if I convert them into images.
How can I place these PDFs (at given positions) using python and without losing the special color.
I tried to read into pypdf, pypdf2 and reportlab but I got lost and the examples I found did not work. I do not need the full code, a hint into the right direction would be enough (even with another language if necessary).
Thanks

Try:
cpdf in.pdf -stamp-on stamp.pdf -pos-left "x y" AND -stamp-on stamp2.pdf -pos-left "x2 y2" AND ..... -o out.pdf
where in.pdf is a blank PDF of appropriate size, and x and y and x2 and y2 etc... are the coordinates required and ..... are parts of the command for the third, fourth etc. stamps.

Here is a sample code to do your task using PyPDF2.
from PyPDF2 import PdfFileMerger
merger = PdfFileMerger()
for pdf in pdf_files:
merger.append(pdf) #pdf_files is a list of the pdf files (path) to be merged.
merger.write(output_pdf) #output_pdf is the path of the merged pdf file.
merger.close()

Apart from joining / merging pages from different documents into one output PDF, PyMuPDF lets you also embed pages from PDFs into an existing page of some target PDF (as if it were an image).
You can select a subrectangle within the source page (a "clip") and the target rectangle of the target page. Multiple embedded source pages in the same target page are also supported.
This embedding maintains all original source page features - it will not be converted to an image.
Scaling between source / target rectangles will be done as necessary.
This snippet will take the full page number 0 of a source PDF and place it inside a rectangle of a page in the target PDF.
The source page will be positioned centered in the target rectangle.
import fitz # import PyMuPDF
source = fitz.open("source.pdf") # source PDF
target = fitz.open("target.pdf") # target PDF
target_page = target[pagenumber] # desired page in target
# if you want a new page, create it like so:
# target_page = target.new_page()
target_rect = fitz.Rect(100, 100, 300, 250) # show source page here
# if you want to cover the full target page, use
# target_rect = target_page.rect
target_page.show_pdf_page(target_rect,
source, # the source document
0, # the source page number
clip=None, # any subrectangle on source page
)
# if desired, more pages from other sources can be put on same target page

Rotating an image in PDF

I have lots of pdf files, each embedded with multiple images that need to be rotated.
I know I can extract the image out, rotate it and then again reconstruct the pdf, but is there any way that I can add a PDF command so that images rotate in place ?
Ideally, a PDF-library in python that will allow me to do that.
Edit:
One important detail I would like to add is that each page can have multiple images and each image needs to be rotated at a different angles. Think a task of straightening the images in a pdf.

I would like to answer your question,
import PyPDF2
pdf_in = open('original.pdf', 'rb')
pdf_reader = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(pdf_in)
pdf_writer = PyPDF2.PdfFileWriter()
for pagenum in range(pdf_reader.numPages):
page = pdf_reader.getPage(pagenum)
page.rotateClockwise(180)#Angle in degrees
pdf_writer.addPage(page)
pdf_out = open('rotated.pdf', 'wb')
pdf_writer.write(pdf_out)
pdf_out.close()
pdf_in.close()
Hope so, this solved your problem

How do I extract text in the right order from PDF using PyPDF2?

I am currently doing a project to extract the contents of a PDF. The code runs smoothly and I am able to extract the text but the extracted text are not in the right order. The code extracts the text in a weird way. The order of the text is all over the place. It does not go from top to bottom and is really confusing.
I looked up online but there was very little help on how to order the text extraction. Most tutorials came up with the same result. For reference, this is the PDF that I am currently testing it on (page 5): https://www.pidm.gov.my/PIDM/files/13/134b5c79-5319-4199-ac68-99f62aca6047.pdf
import PyPDF2
with open('pdftest2.pdf', 'rb') as pdfTest:
reader = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(pdfTest)
page5 = reader.getPage(4)
text = page5.extractText()
print(text)
The extracted text would always start with the footer of the page and then go its way from bottom to top. I noticed in the next page it would start from top to bottom but only for a few certain sentences. Then it would extract text from a different position of the page instead of continuing from where it left off.
All of the text does get extracted but the order of which it is extracted is all over the place. Is there any solution for this problem?

I had to deal with a problem that was similar and it turned out that the module pdfplumber worked better than PyPDF. I guess it depends on the document itself, you should try.
Otherwise another answer to your problem would be to treat the PDFs as images with the pdf2image module and extract the text within them using pytesseract. However it might not be perfect method as the pdf2image method convert_from_path can take quite a long time to run.
I drop some code down here if you are interested.
First of all make sure you install all necessary depedencies as well as Tesseract and ImageMagik. You can find any information regarding install on the website. If you are working with windows there's a good Medium article here.
To convert PDFs to images using pdf2image:
Don't forget to add your poppler path if you are working on windows. It should look like something like that r'C:\<your_path>\poppler-21.02.0\Library\bin'
def pdftoimg(fic,output_folder, poppler_path):
# Store all the pages of the PDF in a variable
pages = convert_from_path(fic, dpi=500,output_folder=output_folder,thread_count=9, poppler_path=poppler_path)
image_counter = 0
# Iterate through all the pages stored above
for page in pages:
filename = "page_"+str(image_counter)+".jpg"
page.save(output_folder+filename, 'JPEG')
image_counter = image_counter + 1
for i in os.listdir(output_folder):
if i.endswith('.ppm'):
os.remove(output_folder+i)
To extract text from the image:
Your tesseract path is going to be something like that: r'C:\Program Files\Tesseract-OCR\tesseract.exe'
def imgtotext(img, tesseract_path):
# Recognize the text as string in image using pytesserct
pytesseract.pytesseract.tesseract_cmd = tesseract_path
text = str(((pytesseract.image_to_string(Image.open(img)))))
text = text.replace('-\n', '')
return text

I recently started using PyMuPDF. It’s licensing is a little confusing but some of their methods have ways to correctly sort the text as it naturally appears (left to right, top to bottom). Something like page.get_text(“words”, sort=True) is all it takes.

Python + PyPdf: Crop region of page and paste it in another page

Lets say you have a pdf page with various complex elements inside.
The objective is to crop a region of the page (to extract only one of the elements) and then paste it in another pdf page.
Here is a simplified version of my code:
import PyPDF2
import PyPdf
def extract_tree(in_file, out_file):
with open(in_file, 'rb') as infp:
# Read the document that contains the tree (in its first page)
reader = pyPdf.PdfFileReader(infp)
page = reader.getPage(0)
# Crop the tree. Coordinates below are only referential
page.cropBox.lowerLeft = [100,200]
page.cropBox.upperRight = [250,300]
# Create an empty document and add a single page containing only the cropped page
writer = pyPdf.PdfFileWriter()
writer.addPage(page)
with open(out_file, 'wb') as outfp:
writer.write(outfp)
def insert_tree_into_page(tree_document, text_document):
# Load the first page of the document containing 'text text text text...'
text_page = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(file(text_document,'rb')).getPage(0)
# Load the previously cropped tree (cropped using 'extract_tree')
tree_page = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(file(tree_document,'rb')).getPage(0)
# Overlay the text-page and the tree-crop
text_page.mergeScaledTranslatedPage(page2=tree_page,scale='1.0',tx='100',ty='200')
# Save the result into a new empty document
output = PyPDF2.PdfFileWriter()
output.addPage(text_page)
outputStream = file('merged_document.pdf','wb')
output.write(outputStream)
# First, crop the tree and save it into cropped_document.pdf
extract_tree('document1.pdf', 'cropped_document.pdf')
# Now merge document2.pdf with cropped_document.pdf
insert_tree_into_page('cropped_document.pdf', 'document2.pdf')
The method "extract_tree" seems to be working. It generates a pdf file containing only the cropped region (in the example, the tree).
The problem in that when I try to paste the tree in the new page, the star and the house of the original image are pasted anyway

I tried something that actually worked. Try to convert your first output(pdf containing only the tree) to docx then convert it another time from docx to pdf before merging it with other pdf pages. It will work(only the tree will be merged).
Allow me to ask please, how did you implement an interface that define the bounds of the crop Au.

I had the exact same issue. In the end, the solution for me was to make a small edit to the source code of pyPDF2 (from this pull request, which never made it into the master branch). What you need to do is insert these lines into the method _mergePage of the class PageObject inside the file pdf.py:
page2Content = ContentStream(page2Content, self.pdf)
page2Content.operations.insert(0, [map(FloatObject, [page2.trimBox.getLowerLeft_x(), page2.trimBox.getLowerLeft_y(), page2.trimBox.getWidth(), page2.trimBox.getHeight()]), "re"])
page2Content.operations.insert(1, [[], "W"])
page2Content.operations.insert(2, [[], "n"])
(see the pull request for exactly where to put them). With that done, you can then crop the section of a pdf you want, and merge it with another page with no issues. There's no need to save the cropped section into a separate pdf, unless you want to.
from PyPDF2 import PdfFileReader, PdfFileWriter
tree_page = PdfFileReader(open('document1.pdf','rb')).getPage(0)
text_page = PdfFileReader(open('document2.pdf','rb')).getPage(0)
tree_page.cropBox.lowerLeft = [100,200]
tree_page.cropBox.upperRight = [250, 300]
text_page.mergeScaledTranslatedPage(page2=tree_page, scale='1.0', tx='100', ty='200')
output = PdfFileWriter()
output.addPage(text_page)
output.write(open('merged_document.pdf', 'wb'))
Maybe there's a better way of doing this that inserts that code without directly editing the source code. I'd be grateful if anyone finds a way to do it as this admittedly is a slightly dodgy hack.

Python: How to make Reportlab move to next page in PDF output

I'm using the open source version Reportlab with Python on Windows. My code loops through multiple PNG files & combines them to form a single PDF. Each PNG is stretched to the full LETTER spec (8.5x11).
Problem is, all the images saved to output.pdf are sandwiched on top of each other and only the last image added is visible. Is there something that I need to add between each drawImage() to offset to a new page? Here's a simple linear view of what I'm doing -
WIDTH,HEIGHT = LETTER
canv = canvas.Canvas('output.pdf',pagesize=LETTER)
canv.setPageCompression(0)
page = Image.open('one.png')
canv.drawImage(ImageReader(page),0,0,WIDTH,HEIGHT)
page = Image.open('two.png')
canv.drawImage(ImageReader(page),0,0,WIDTH,HEIGHT)
page = Image.open('three.png')
canv.drawImage(ImageReader(page),0,0,WIDTH,HEIGHT)
canv.save()

[Follow up of the post's comment]
Use canv.showPage() after you use canv.drawImage(...) each time.
( http://www.reportlab.com/apis/reportlab/dev/pdfgen.html#reportlab.pdfgen.canvas.Canvas.showPage )
Follow the source document(for that matter any tool you are using, you should dig into it's respective website documentation):
http://www.reportlab.com/apis/reportlab/dev/pdfgen.html