Tiny PDF writer
Project description
pdf·je [🔉 PDF·yuh] (noun) Dutch for ‘small PDF’
Write beautiful PDFs in declarative Python.
Currently in active development. See the roadmap for supported features. Leave a ⭐️ on GitHub if you’re interested how this develops!
Why?
There are many PDF libraries for Python, but none of them have these features:
🧩 Declarative API
In most PDF writers, you first create various empty objects and then mutate them with methods like addText(), all while changing the state of the writer with methods like setFont(). Pdf’je is different. You describe the document you want to write, and the library takes care of the details. No state to manage, no mutations. This makes your code easier to reuse and reason about.
📐 Polished typography
Legibility counts. And kerning — i.e. adjusting the spacing between letters — is a key part of this. Automatic kerning is supported everywhere, from web browsers to word processors. However, most PDF writers don’t support it. By using font metrics to calculate the correct kerning, pdf’je helps you write documents that look great.
🎈 Small footprint
PDF supports many features, but most of the time you only need a few. Why install many dependencies — just to write a simple document? Not only is pdf’je pure-Python, it allows you to install only the dependencies you need.
Quickstart
Getting text onto paper is super easy:
from pdfje import Document
Document("Olá Mundo!").write("hello.pdf")See the tutorial for a complete overview of features, including:
Styling text including font, size, and color
Automatic layout of text into one or more columns
Builtin and embedded fonts
Drawing basic shapes
Roadmap
Pdf’je is still in active development, so it is not yet feature-complete. Until the 1.0 version, the API may change with minor releases.
Features:
✅ = implemented, 🚧 = planned, ❌ = not planned
- Typesetting
✅ Automatic kerning
✅ Wrapping text into lines, columns, and pages
✅ Page sizes
🚧 Centering text
🚧 Justification
🚧 Hyphenation
🚧 Avoiding orphaned lines
- Drawing operations
✅ Lines
✅ Rectangles
✅ Circles, ellipses
🚧 Arbitrary paths, fills, and strokes
- Text styling
✅ Font and size
✅ Embedded fonts
✅ Colors
✅ Bold, italic
🚧 Underline and strikethrough
🚧 Superscript and subscript
❌ Complex fill patterns
🚧 Images
🚧 Bookmarks and links
🚧 Tables
🚧 Inline markup with Markdown (Commonmark/MyST)
❌ Emoji
❌ Tables of contents
❌ Forms
❌ Annotations
Installation
It’s available on PyPI.
pip install pdfjeBy default, no additional dependencies are installed. If you’d like to use custom fonts, you’ll need fontTools, which is included in the [fonts] extras:
pip install pdfje[fonts]License
This library is licensed under the terms of the MIT license. It also includes short scripts from other projects (see pdfje/vendor), which are also MIT licensed.
Contributing
Here are some useful tips for developing in the pdfje codebase itself:
Install dependencies with poetry install.
To write output files during tests, use pytest --output-path=<outpur-dir>
To also run more comprehensive but ‘slow’ tests, use pytest --runslow
Alternatives
If pdf’je doesn’t suit your needs, here are some other options:
PyFPDF
ReportLab
WeasyPrint
borb
wkhtmltopdf
pydyf
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