pdfplumber VS WeasyPrint

- [pdfplumber](https://github.com/jsvine/pdfplumber)

I recently published a story that was based on some data analysis I did of a report I obtained from the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services in VA. I wanted to share a quick walkthrough of how I extracted the data from tables in a PDF using a Python module called PDFplumber. I also uploaded a video to Youtube if you prefer that.

I've been working with pdfplumber, which is built atop pdfminer.six. It allows one to break the page up into sections and extract text from them in turn, which may help keep columns separated better.

You could try pdfplumber

I'm not sure if there is a way to reliably detect bold characters: https://github.com/jsvine/pdfplumber/issues/724

pdfplumber is also pretty good. It can help segment text a bit better than pdfminer can alone.

To handle machine generated one, a possible package is pdfplumber.

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:

You should maybe check out weasyprint. https://weasyprint.org/