python-poppler

python-poppler is a Python binding to the poppler-cpp library. It allows to read, render, or modify PDF documents. More specifically, it currently allows to:

• read an modify document meta data;
• list and read embedded documents;
• list the fonts used by the document;
• search or extract text on a given page of the document;
• render a page to a raw image;
• get info about transitions effects between the pages;
• read the table of contents of the document.

Download

Requirements

You nedd Python version 3.7 or 3.8. You will also need the usual build tools (cmake, gcc...)

This package is currently distributed as source only, and is currently tested on Linux only. It requires poppler 0.62 or higher (but 0.87 or higher is recommended). I will provide a WIndows build once I figure out how to compile poppler for Windows.

You need poppler-cpp with headers, python (3.7 or 3.8) with headers, and cmake. On Arch linux, you need the poppler package. On Ubuntu, you need to install libpoppler-cpp-dev.

Install from PyPI

Package is available on PyPI. To install, you simply need to issue the following command, preferabily in a python virtual environment:

$ pip install python-poppler

Install from git sources

Sources are available on GitHub:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/cbrunet/python-poppler.git

pybind11 sources are included as submodule. If you cloned the repository without the submodules, you can get them with the command

git submodule update --init --recurse

If you want to use an installed version of pybind11 instead of the submodule, you can replace add_subdirectory(pybind11) by find_package(pybind11) in the [CMakeLists.txt] file.

The whole build process is handled by the setup.py file. It will invoke the needed cmake commands, and install the files at the right place.

For instance, to install in the current environment:

$ python setup.py install

This will compile the binary packages, and install the library.

Tests are run using tox:

$ tox

Building from Poppler sources

$ git clone https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler.git
$ cd poppler
$ git checkout poppler-0.89.0
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake \
    -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
    -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr/local \
    -DENABLE_UNSTABLE_API_ABI_HEADERS=ON \
    -DBUILD_GTK_TESTS=OFF \
    -DBUILD_QT5_TESTS=OFF \
    -DBUILD_CPP_TESTS=OFF \
    -DENABLE_CPP=ON \
    -DENABLE_GLIB=OFF \
    -DENABLE_GOBJECT_INTROSPECTION=OFF \
    -DENABLE_GTK_DOC=OFF \
    -DENABLE_QT5=OFF \
    -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON \
    ..
$ make
$ mkdir ../dist
$ sudo make install

You can omit the git checkout step if you want to work on HEAD.

To find the right version of poppler when compiling python-poppler, you can set the PKG_CONFIG_PATH env var:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
$ cd python-poppler
$ python setup.py bdist_wheel

To build the wheel, you need the wheel package, if not already installed. Alternatively, you could simply do python setup.py install, preferabily in a virtual environment.

You may need to tell the system where to find the Poppler shared libraries, by setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH env var:

$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
$ python
>>> import poppler
>>> poppler.version()
(0, 89, 0)

Usage

The package is installed as poppler. It follows the interface of poppler-cpp. Therefore, you can refer to the documentation of the C++ library.

Example:

from poppler import load_from_file, PageRenderer

pdf_document = load_from_file("sample.pdf")
page_1 = pdf_document.create_page(0)
page_1_text = page_1.text()

renderer = PageRenderer()
image = renderer.render_page(page_1)
image_data = image.data

Contributing

Contributions are welcome.

Please use the GitHub issue tracker to report bugs or request features. You can also submit Pull requests.

Code is formatted using black. Ensure that everything is well formatted. You can use

tox -e lint

to lint your code.

Please ensure that all tests pass, by running tox.

Please provide unit tests covering the new feature, or prooving that a bug is corrected, when possible.