Installation and setup

PyPDFForm is available on PyPI and can be installed using any compatible tool, with pip being the most common choice.

Install using pip

PyPDFForm requires Python 3.8+.

Create a virtual environment before installation. Then, run the following command to install PyPDFForm:

pip install PyPDFForm

To upgrade PyPDFForm as well as all its dependencies, run:

pip install -U PyPDFForm

Create a PDF wrapper

The library provides two classes for abstracting PDF forms. Use FormWrapper to fill a PDF form without needing other APIs; more information is available here.

PdfWrapper implements most PyPDFForm APIs and accepts various optional parameters, with the PDF form template being the most critical.

For example, if you download this PDF, you will want to instantiate your object like this:

from PyPDFForm import PdfWrapper

pdf = PdfWrapper("sample_template.pdf")

PyPDFForm provides an adapter for different file interaction methods in Python, allowing you to pass your PDF form to PdfWrapper as a file path, open file object, or bytes file stream.

This means the following two snippets are equivalent to the above:

from PyPDFForm import PdfWrapper

with open("sample_template.pdf", "rb+") as template:
    pdf = PdfWrapper(template)

from PyPDFForm import PdfWrapper

with open("sample_template.pdf", "rb+") as template:
    pdf = PdfWrapper(template.read())

This file adaptation applies to all PyPDFForm APIs. You can replace file path parameters with file objects or streams throughout the documentation.

Use full widget name in PDF wrapper (beta)

NOTE: This is a beta feature that requires further testing with various PDF forms and may not be compatible with all forms.

According to section 12.7.3.2 found on page 434 of the PDF standard, each PDF form widget can have a fully qualified name that is not explicitly defined but can be constructed following the pattern <parent_widget_name>.<widget_name>.

PyPDFForm supports accessing widgets through their full names by simply setting the optional parameter use_full_widget_name to True when a PdfWrapper object is instantiated. Consider this PDF:

from PyPDFForm import PdfWrapper

pdf = PdfWrapper("sample_template_with_full_key.pdf", use_full_widget_name=True)

The checkbox widget on the second page with texts Gain de 2 classes has a partial name of 0 and a full name of Gain de 2 classes.0. By constructing the object like above, you can access the same checkbox through both the partial name and the full name.

NOTE: When using full widget names, the update_widget_key and commit_widget_key_updates methods are disabled and raise a NotImplementedError because full names involve both the widget and its parent.

Write to a file

PdfWrapper also behaves like an open file object, allowing you to write the PDF to another file or buffer.

from PyPDFForm import PdfWrapper

pdf = PdfWrapper("sample_template.pdf")

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

And it doesn't have to be a disk file, it can be a memory buffer as well:

from io import BytesIO

from PyPDFForm import PdfWrapper

pdf = PdfWrapper("sample_template.pdf")

with BytesIO() as output:
    output.write(pdf.read())