Important API Changes

Happy new year fellow developers! We start the year 2024 with a new release of v1.4.0 and there are some important changes I'm making to the APIs of the library.

• The PDF object that gets instantiated is now PyPDFForm.PdfWrapper, changed from PyPDFForm.PyPDFForm.
• Form widgets are now accessed via the PdfWrapper.widgets attribute, changed from PdfWrapper.elements.
• The JSON schema of the form data is now accessed via a new attribute called PdfWrapper.schema, changed from the old method of PdfWrapper.generate_schema().

All the old APIs will be persisted for half a year and then fully deprecated. Each of them will emit a DeprecationWarning when invoked, so it is advised that you make the switch before they are removed and start breaking your code.

Happy hacking!

Introduction

PyPDFForm is a free and open source pure-Python 3 library for PDF form processing. It contains the essential functionalities needed to interact with PDF forms:

• Inspect what data a PDF form needs to be filled with.
• Fill a PDF form by simply creating a Python dictionary.
• Create a subset of form widgets on a PDF.

It also supports other common utilities such as extracting pages and merging multiple PDFs together.

Installing

Install using pip:

pip install PyPDFForm

Quick Example

A sample PDF form can be found here. Download it and try:

from PyPDFForm import PdfWrapper

filled = PdfWrapper("sample_template.pdf").fill(
    {
        "test": "test_1",
        "check": True,
        "test_2": "test_2",
        "check_2": False,
        "test_3": "test_3",
        "check_3": True,
    },
)

with open("output.pdf", "wb+") as output:
    output.write(filled.read())

After running the above code snippet you can find output.pdf at the location you specified, and it should look like this.

Documentation

The official documentation can be found on the GitHub page of this repository.

Public Speak

Chicago Python User Group - Dec 14, 2023

How to Contribute

It is difficult to make sure that the library supports all the PDF form creating tools out there. So if you run into a case where the library does not work for certain PDF forms created by certain tools, feel free to open an issue with the problematic PDF form attached. I will seek to make the library support the attached PDF form as well as the tool used to create it.