Installation and setup

PyPDFForm is hosted on PyPI and any tool that supports downloading from it can be used. The most common option is to use pip.

Install using pip

PyPDFForm requires Python 3.8+.

It is advised that a virtual environment is always created beforehand. Then you can run the following command to install:

pip install PyPDFForm

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

pip install -U PyPDFForm

Create a PDF wrapper

There are two classes provided by the library that abstract a PDF form. The FormWrapper class allows you to fill a PDF form if you don't need any other API. More info about FormWrapper can be found here.

The class that implements most of PyPDFForm's APIs is PdfWrapper. It takes various optional parameters to instantiate, with the most important one being the PDF form "template".

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 does implement an adapter for different ways Python interacts with files. So you can pass your PDF form to PdfWrapper in three different ways: a file path, an open file object, and a file stream that's in bytes.

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 adaptation is universal across all APIs of PyPDFForm. So in later sections of the documentation whenever you see a function parameter that's a file path you can safely switch them for a file object or file stream.

Write to a file

Lastly, PdfWrapper also implements itself similar to an open file object. So you can write the PDF it holds to another file:

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())