Add Text to Existing PDF Using Python

Add text to Existing PDF using Python

I know this is an older post, but I spent a long time trying to find a solution. I came across a decent one using only ReportLab and PyPDF so I thought I'd share:

1. read your PDF using PdfFileReader(), we'll call this input
2. create a new pdf containing your text to add using ReportLab, save this as a string object
3. read the string object using PdfFileReader(), we'll call this text
4. create a new PDF object using PdfFileWriter(), we'll call this output
5. iterate through input and apply .mergePage(*text*.getPage(0)) for each page you want the text added to, then use output.addPage() to add the modified pages to a new document

This works well for simple text additions. See PyPDF's sample for watermarking a document.

Here is some code to answer the question below:

packet = StringIO.StringIO()
can = canvas.Canvas(packet, pagesize=letter)
<do something with canvas>
can.save()
packet.seek(0)
input = PdfFileReader(packet)

From here you can merge the pages of the input file with another document.

Adding Text to a PDF via Python

try this as already mentioned here

from PyPDF2 import PdfFileWriter, PdfFileReader
import io
from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas
from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter

copyfile("newPDF.pdf", "basePDF.pdf")

packet = io.BytesIO()

# do whatever writing you want to do
can = canvas.Canvas(packet, pagesize=letter)
can.drawString(10, 100, "Hello world")
can.save()

#move to the beginning of the StringIO buffer
packet.seek(0)
new_pdf = PdfFileReader(packet)
# read your existing PDF
existing_pdf = PdfFileReader(open("basePDF.pdf", "rb"))
output = PdfFileWriter()
# add the "watermark" (which is the new pdf) on the existing page
page = existing_pdf.getPage(0)
page.mergePage(new_pdf.getPage(0))
output.addPage(page)

# finally, write "output" to a real file
outputStream = open("destination.pdf", "wb")
output.write(outputStream)
outputStream.close()

Add text to existing PDF document in Python

You should look at Add text to Existing PDF using Python and also Python as PDF Editing and Processing Framework. These will point you in the right direction.

If you do what you've proposed in the question, when you export back to .pdf, it will really just be an image file embedded in a .pdf, it won't be text.

---

Related Topics