Documentation

The Python API closely follows the Poppler Qt5 C++ interface library API, documented at https://poppler.freedesktop.org/api/qt5/ .

Note: Releases of PyQt5 < 5.4 currently do not support the QtXml module, all methods that use the QDomDocument, QDomElement and QDomNode types are disabled. This concerns the Document::toc() method and some constructors and the store() methods in the Annotation subclasses. So, using PyQt5 >= 5.4 is recommended.

Wherever the C++ API requires QList, QSet or QLinkedList, any Python sequence can be used. API calls that return QList, QSet or QLinkedList all return Python lists.

There are a few other differences:

Poppler::Document::getPdfVersion(int *major, int *minor) can simply be called as d.getPdfVersion(), (where d is a Poppler::Document instance); it will return a tuple of two integers (major, minor).

Poppler::Document has __len__ and __getitem__ methods, corresponding to numPages() and page(int num).

Poppler::FontIterator (returned by Poppler::Document::newFontIterator) is also a Python iterable (e.g. has __iter__() and __next__() methods). So although you can use:

it = document.newFontIterator()
while it.hasNext():
    fonts = it.next()  # list of FontInfo objects
    ...

you can also use the more Pythonic:

for fonts in document.newFontIterator():
    ...

In addition to the Poppler namespace, there are two toplevel module functions:

popplerqt5.version()

returns the version of the python-poppler-qt5 package as a tuple of ints, e.g. (0, 18, 2).

popplerqt5.poppler_version()

returns the version of the linked Poppler-Qt5 library as a tuple of ints, e.g. (0, 24, 5).

This is determined at build time. If at build time the Poppler-Qt5 version could not be determined and was not specified, an empty tuple might be returned.