Add margins to PDFs

I have a tablet with a pen as ebook-reader. I like to make notes on the side of the PDFs when reading. Often there is not enough space on the margins.

I also like to draw diagrams and notes on the PDF. There is not enough space at the top and bottom. This leads to bad nodes and diagrams I can not decypher later.

This tool adds margins around the text. With this I have enough space for my thoughts and ideas and space to learn.

Features

• Add marigins around the text
• Fixed points as margin (e.g. 100)
• Relative margin (e.g. left=0.3)

Before:

After:

## Installation

To install the `pdfmargins` package, use one of the following commands:

**CLI Only**:
If you only need the command-line interface, run:
```bash
pip3 install pdfmargins

CLI + Gradio App: If you want to include the Gradio app as well, use:

poetry install pdfmargins[app]

CLI + FastAPI API: To include the FastAPI API, run:

poetry install pdfmargins[api]

All Components (CLI, Gradio App, FastAPI API): If you want to install everything, use:

poetry add pdfmargins[all]

From within the project: If you cloned the project, run in the project root:

poetry install --with all

Verifying the Installation

To verify that the installation was successful, you can run the CLI command:

pdfmargins --help
pdfmargins-app --help # if installed
pdfmargins-api --help # if installed

This should display the help information for the command-line interface.

Usage

See scripts/example_usage.sh for a runnable script, that is also checked by the test-suite (e2e).

Common use-case is to run

python3 cli.py path/to/pdf-file.pdf

This creates a file called path/to/pdf-file.margins.pdf as output.

Or you can process a directory via

python3 cli.py path/to/dir/with/pdfs/

If there is a path/to/dir/with/pdfs/a.pdf there is now a path/to/dir/with/pdfs/a.margins.pdf as output.

If you want to know more, check

python3 cli.py --help

More information

If you nee to know details, check out pdfmargins/cli.py. It is pretty straightforward.

Limitations and next Steps

• Output-directory, not only suffix for output-files
• FastAPI server in Dockerfile to make installation easy (with Gradio UI)
• Make it intallable (as python-package)
• Add nix-package
• Detect if 2 columns and be smart where to add margins (1 column, only right margin)
• Add background, like raster, dots, etc.

Next steps

• Make it installable
• Push to pypi
• Set into metadata that margins were added
• One or two columns?

Thank you

This is just a wrapper around

• pypdf