Show HN: A Python PDF Form Library

4 points

2 years ago

Hi HN! I have a project that I have been working on for three years that I’d love to show you today called PyPDForm (https://github.com/chinapandaman/PyPDFForm). It is a Python library that specializes in processing PDF forms, with the most outstanding feature being programmatically filling a PDF form by simply feeding a Python dictionary.

I used to work at a startup company with Python as our backend stack. We were constantly given paper documents by our clients that we needed to generate into PDFs. We were doing it using reportlab scripts and I quickly found the process tedious and time consuming for more complex PDFs.

This is where the idea of this project came from. Instead of writing lengthy and unmaintainable reportlab scripts to generate PDFs, you can just turn any paper document into a PDF form template and PyPDFForm can fill it easily.

On top of the GitHub repo, here are some additional resources for this project:

PyPi: https://pypi.org/project/PyPDFForm/

Docs: https://chinapandaman.github.io/PyPDFForm/

A public speak I did about this project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t1RdAKwr9w

I hope you guys find the library helpful for your own PDF generation workflow. Feel free to try it, test it, leave comments or suggestions, and open issues. And of course if you are willing, kindly give me a star on GitHub.