WeasyPrint VS PyPDF2

Also see a full web rendering engine (modern HTML+CSS the whole layout engine) made in pure Python, that can export to PDFs: https://github.com/Kozea/WeasyPrint

Is there a reason you didn't consider something like Weasyprint?

https://weasyprint.org

I've gone through a number of systems to convert CV's, business cards, and other docs and it hasn't let me down yet.

You don't _have_ to use a browser. I had very good results with Weasyprint [0]. And there's also PrinceXML [1] if you're willing to pay.

[0]: https://weasyprint.org/

Thanks for your answer! I imagined you would be using PrinceXML behind the scenes since that is probably the gold standard in HTML+CSS rendering.

The only open source alternative I know of is WeasyPrint at https://weasyprint.org/. I'm not sure how well it fares against PrinceXML, though.

And thanks for the pointer to Taffy - I didn't know it before!

Flexbox support has been [included][1] since 2018, although my use case was the prototypical one - a single row w/ 3 columns - so YMMV with how it handles more complex layouts.

[1]: https://github.com/Kozea/WeasyPrint/pull/579

Performance is not the strength of WeasyPrint, meaning that heavy HTML files will increase generation time. You should always compress images before attaching them, as they are not compressed by default. Generating a 50-page-long PDF may take up to a minute in extreme cases, although multi-page documents generated on my project take fewer than 2 seconds to generate.

For Python there is Weasyprint: you prepare the invoice as an HTML document, and Weasyprint turns it into a PDF

https://weasyprint.org/

Well yes, but you can implement HTML+CSS. WeasyPrint did from scratch, and independent implementations of HTML+CSS are considerably more numerous than HTML+CSS+JS.

In a recent project I used https://github.com/Kozea/WeasyPrint/ it is written in python, so you will need to use it like so:

I still haven't needed to do that part in Rust yet, unfortunately. My mother is still using the pypdf-based concatenator I wrote for her years ago.

I did an extremely quick search and am linking this without knowing anything about it.

Pretty much study Python until this Github repo'd Readme makes sense!: https://github.com/py-pdf/PyPDF2

As other posters have said, if you're just generating PDFs, that's doable with minor library support. If you want to open existing PDFs and do anything non-trivial with them, you'll want a mature, powerful PDF parsing library. PDFKit, which is part of macOS is pretty amazing. If you need portability, something like Python's PyPDF2 is probably the best bet. Knowing the Rust community, though, we'll probably get a library at least as good in Rust in a surprisingly short amount of time.

Why are you using PyPDF4 which seems to have no active maintainer and no documentation instead of PyPDF2 which has both?

one of many options

Feel free. I poked around the PyPDF2 code and it seems like reading signatures is something it supports via xfa_form property (GitHub issue where this was discussed; seems to have been closed v. recently) . would probably be a very simple PR provided you knew where to look for that property.