I want to automatically generate booking confirmation PDF files in Python. Most of the content will be static (i.e. logos, booking terms, phone numbers), with a few dynamic bits (dates, costs, etc).
From the user side, the simplest way to do this would be to start with a PDF file with the static content, and then using python to just add the dynamic parts. Is this a simple process?
From doing a bit of search, it seems that I can use reportlab for creating content and pyPdf for merging PDF's together. Is this the best approach? Or is there a really funky way that I haven't come across yet?
Thanks!
From the user side, the simplest way to do this would be to start with a PDF file with the static content, and then using python to just add the dynamic parts. Is this a simple process?
Unfortunately no. There are several tools that are good at producing PDFs from scratch (most commonly for Python, ReportLab), but they don't generally load existing PDFs. You would have to include generating code for any boilerplate text, lines, blocks, shapes and images, rather than this being freely editable by the user.
On the other side there's pyPdf which can load PDFs, collate the pages, and extract some of the information, but can't really add new content. You can ‘merge’ pages into one, but you'd still have to create the extra information overlay as a page in ReportLab first.
Look into docutils and reSTructuredText. You could quickly write out your PDF document in reST and then compile the PDF using rst2pdf.py
I've used this, it creates very beautiful documents and the markup is extensible! Later you could take the same code and run it into rst2html to create a website out if it!
Take a look here:
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickref.html
http://code.google.com/p/rst2pdf/
Good luck
You could generate a document through, for example, TeX, or OpenOffice, or whatever gives you the most comfortable bindings and then print the document with a pdf printer.
This allows you not to have to figure out where to put fields precisely or figure out what to do if your content overflows the space allocated for it.
Related
I have a PDF file which consists of tables which can spread across various pages and may have text in between. An example of it can be found here.
I am able to convert the PDF to any format but the output files are not in any way parse-able i.e. I cannot extract data out of it as they are scattered. Here are the links to the output files which I created using pdftotext and pdftohtml.
Is there a way to extract data in a more suitable way?
Thanks in advance.
The general answer is no. pdf is a format intended for visual presentation and printing, and there is no guarantee that the contents will be in any particular order let alone structured as a table in any way other than what appears when the pdf is rendered onto paper or a screen. Sometimes there is even deliberate obfuscation to prevent anyone doing what you are attempting.
In this case it appears to be possible to cut and paste the contents of each table element. For a small number of similar files that is almost certainly the quickest thing to do. Open the pdf on the left hand of your screen, a spreadsheet or data-entry program on the right hand, then cut and paste. For a medium number - tens, hundreds? - it's probably cheapest to hire a temp to do the donkey-work. For a large number - thousands? - it would be possible to create a program to automate this process, but definitely not easy. I might think about using human input via the mouse to identify the corners of the table and the horizontal / vertical divisions, then generating cut and paste operations via control of the human interface devices. Don't ask me how. I'd have to find out if I had to do this, and I'd much rather not. It's a WOMBAT.
Whatever form of analysis you did on the pdf contents would certainly not generalize to other pdfs created by different organisations using different software, and possibly not even by the same organisation using the same process but merely a later release of the same software.
Following in the line of #nigel222, it really depends on the PDF how easily you can get the data out in some useful way.
It is best if the PDF is structured (has a document structure, created when the PDF was written). In this case, you can access the structure, and you are all set.
As structure is a fundamental necessity of an accessible PDF, you may try to "massage" the document by applying the various "make accessible" utilities floating around; definitely something to follow.
I have created a really nice looking invitation letter in word (.doc/.docx). Now, I need to personalize it for 1,000 people with their names and associated QR codes.
I tried working with pyfpdf and reportlab but it seems like in order to use these packages I have to re-generate the whole invitation letter along with text and graphics. I'm not sure if I will be able to generate an equally visually appealing letter as I have now in word (at least not without a lot of effort).
Is there a better way, where I use word template as input, fill-in the name and QR code and generate PDF?
If you are prepared to do the QR code and personalization in reportlab, then pdfrw (disclaimer: I am the author) will let you either merge the PDFs after the fact (similar to a watermarking operation), or can bring the PDF you generate from word in to reportlab a form XObject (similar to an image). You can use it for a background.
You should try using the Microsoft Word MailMerge feature which will probably do exactly what you want from within Word itself.
PDF editing is a very complex beast, as is docx editing. The majority of companies who offer PDF "support" use PDF APIs, since the software to edit and create PDF documents is so complex it's a retailable product in itself.
You can use MailMerge either to print or to email the PDF to lots of people at once with custom settings for each person.
I have a python script that exports 772 pdfs and combines them into a multi-page pdf binder. While exporting each PDF, it also adds the name of the current pdf as an entry in a text file. After the whole binder is created, the text file has an entry for each PDF page in the same order as the PDF binder. I need to use this text file to create an index page at the beginning of the PDF, preferably linking to each page in the document.
If I have to do this task manually, I will (and I'm open to suggestions), but I hope to find a way to automate this.
Also, this doesn't have to be done in Python, but it would be nice to fit it in with my current script.
Thanks for the feedback,
Tanner
Poking around in the docs for arcpy.mapping, I can see that you weren't kidding about "it's limited".
Rather than adding new pages, have you considered adding bookmarks to the PDF?
And the only Python software I could dig up that can add bookmarks was pdfrecylce. It's in version 0.05, so I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess it might not be too stable.
If you're willing to use Java or C# there's iText and iTextSharp (but I'm biased). There are quite a few other PDF libraries floating around capable of manipulating existing PDFs... pick a language and start googling.
PDFsam will merge PDFs and create an index with links based on each individual PDF file name or title.
I initially downloaded PDFsam Basic because it will auto organize the PDFs to be merged in order of folder structure instead of only alphabetically. To add multiple PDFs from various folders I go to a directory, search "." to locate and select all the PDFs to add. I think the PDFsam Enhanced allows you to simply drag and drop an entire folder directory. Highly recommend.
In Python, I have files generated by ReportLab. Now, i need to extract some pages from that PDF and hide confidential information.
I can create a PDF file with blacked-out spots and use pyPdf to mergePage, but people can still select and copy-paste the information under the blacked-out spots.
Is there a way to make those spots completely confidential?
Per example, I need to hide addresses on the pages, how would i do it?
Thanks,
Basically you'll have to remove the corresponding text drawing commands in the PDF's page content stream. It's much easier to generate the pages twice, once with the confidential information, once without them.
It might be possible (I don't know ReportLab enough) to specially craft the PDF in a way that the confidential information is easier accessible (e.g. as separate XObjects) for deletion. Still you'd have to do pretty low-level operations on the PDF -- which I would advise against.
(Sorry, I was not able to log on when I posted the question...)
Unfortunately, the document cannot be regenerated at will (context sensitive), and those PDF files (about 35) are 3000+ pages.
I was thinking about using pdf2ps and pdf2ps back, but there is a lot of quality.
pdf2ps -dLanguageLevel=3 input.pdf - | ps2pdf14 - output.pdf
And if i use "pdftops" instead, the text is still selectable. If there is a way to make it non-selectable like with "pdf2ps" but with better quality, it will do too.
I am using reportlab toolkit in Python to generate some reports in PDF format. I want to use some predefined parts of documents already published in PDF format to be included in generated PDF file. Is it possible (and how) to accomplish this in reportlab or in python library?
I know I can use some other tools like PDF Toolkit (pdftk) but I am looking for Python-based solution.
I'm currently using PyPDF to read, write, and combine existing PDF's and ReportLab to generate new content. Using the two package seemed to work better than any single package I was able to find.
If you want to place existing PDF pages in your Reportlab documents I recommend pdfrw. Unlike PageCatcher it is free.
I've used it for several projects where I need to add barcodes etc to existing documents and it works very well. There are a couple of examples on the project page of how to use it with Reportlab.
A couple of things to note though:
If the source PDF contains errors (due to the originating program following the PDF spec imperfectly for example), pdfrw may fail even though something like Adobe Reader has no apparent problems reading the PDF. pdfrw is currently not very fault tolerant.
Also, pdfrw works by being completely agnostic to the actual content of the PDF page you are placing. So for example, you wouldn't be able to use pdfrw inspect a page to see if it contains a certain string of text in the lower right-hand corner. However if you don't need to do anything like that you should be fine.
There is an add-on for ReportLab — PageCatcher.