pdfRest Python SDK

Build production-grade PDF automation with the official Python SDK for pdfRest: a powerful PDF API platform for conversion, OCR, extraction, redaction, security, forms, and AI-ready document workflows.

• Homepage: pdfrest.com
• API docs: docs.pdfrest.com
• Python SDK docs: python.pdfrest.com
• API Lab: pdfrest.com/apilab

Why pdfRest

• Enterprise PDF quality powered by Adobe PDF Library technology.
• Fast onboarding with API Lab, code samples, and straightforward REST patterns.
• Chainable API workflows that let you pass outputs between calls.
• Deployment flexibility: Cloud, self-hosted on AWS, or self-hosted container.
• Security and compliance resources published in the trust center and product documentation.

Why this SDK

• Official typed Python interface to pdfRest (PdfRestClient and AsyncPdfRestClient).
• Pydantic-backed request/response models for safer integrations.
• High-level helpers for the endpoints teams use most in production.
• Consistent error handling, request customization, and file management helpers.

What you can build

Use this PDF API for workflows like:

• Convert and transform: PDF to Word/Excel/PowerPoint/PostScript/images/Markdown, and convert files to PDF/PDF-A/PDF-X.
• Generate PDFs: Markdown, plain text, JSON, XML, and CSV with page layout, typography, and tagging controls.
• Print workflows: PostScript/EPS to PDF with custom job options.
• Render protected PDFs: PNG/BMP/GIF/JPEG/TIFF output using the open password.
• Extract and analyze: OCR, text extraction, image extraction, PDF metadata.
• Add content: overlay text, images, lines, and rectangles on PDF pages.
• Secure and govern: redaction, encryption, permissions, signing, watermarking.
• Compose and optimize: merge/split, compress, flatten, rasterize, color conversion.
• Form operations: import/export form data, flatten forms, XFA to Acroforms.

Built for AI and LLM pipelines

pdfRest is especially useful for document AI systems:

• Convert PDFs to structured Markdown for downstream retrieval and training data prep.
• Extract clean text and metadata for indexing and chunking pipelines.
• Summarize and translate document content with API-native operations.
• Keep multi-step pipelines efficient by chaining outputs between operations.

Installation

pdfrest supports Python 3.10+.

With uv:

uv add pdfrest

With pip:

python -m pip install pdfrest

Quick start

Set your API key in PDFREST_API_KEY:

export PDFREST_API_KEY="your-api-key"

Run your script with uv:

uv run python your_script.py

Or with Python:

python your_script.py

Example (upload + extract text):

from pathlib import Path

from pdfrest import PdfRestClient

with PdfRestClient() as client:
    uploaded = client.files.create_from_paths([Path("input.pdf")])[0]
    result = client.extract_pdf_text(uploaded, full_text="document")

preview = ""
if result.full_text is not None and result.full_text.document_text is not None:
    preview = result.full_text.document_text[:500]
print(preview)

Async example:

import asyncio
from pathlib import Path

from pdfrest import AsyncPdfRestClient


async def main() -> None:
    async with AsyncPdfRestClient() as client:
        uploaded = (await client.files.create_from_paths([Path("input.pdf")]))[0]
        result = await client.extract_pdf_text(uploaded, full_text="document")
        preview = ""
        if result.full_text is not None and result.full_text.document_text is not None:
            preview = result.full_text.document_text[:500]
        print(preview)


asyncio.run(main())

Deployment options

• Cloud (default): use PdfRestClient() with PDFREST_API_KEY.
• Self-hosted: set base_url="https://your-api-host" and keep the same Python SDK surface.

Learn more

• API toolkit overview: pdfrest.com
• Resources and insights: pdfrest.com/resources
• Example scripts: examples/README.md
• Python SDK docs: python.pdfrest.com

For contributors

See the contributing guide for development setup, checks, and contribution workflows.

License

This SDK is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.