Tiny PDF writer
Project description
pdf·je [🔉 PDF·yuh] (noun) Dutch for ‘small PDF’
Write beautiful PDFs in declarative Python.
(Currently in active development. Leave a ⭐️ on GitHub if you’re interested how this develops!)
Features
Pdf’je distinguishes itself with the following combination of features:
🧩 Declarative API
In most PDF writers, you first create empty objects and then mutate them with methods like addText(), all while changing the state with methods like setFont(). Pdf’je is different. You describe the document you want to write, and it takes care of the details. No state to manage, no mutations. This makes your code easier to reuse and reason about.
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
See the roadmap for supported features.
📖 Decent typography
Legibility counts — and kerning is a key part of this. We’ve come to expect it everywhere, from web browsers to word processors. However, most PDF writers don’t support it. By using the proper metadata, pdf’je helps you write documents that look great.
🎈 Small footprint
The PDF format 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.
pip install pdfje # no dependencies
pip install pdfje[fonts, hyphens] # embedded fonts and improved hyphenationRoadmap
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/widowed lines
🚧 Tex-style line breaking
🚧 Broader unicode support in text wrapping
- 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
🚧 Bullet/numbered lists
🚧 Inline markup with Markdown (Commonmark/MyST)
❌ Emoji
❌ Tables of contents
❌ Forms
❌ Annotations
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 either also MIT licensed, or in the public domain.
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
Acknowledgements
pdf’je is inspired by the following projects. If you’re looking for a PDF writer, you may want to check them out as well:
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