Show HN: I am building a new Python library to read/write PDF files

• pdfsyntax

  8 420 8.5 Python

  A Python library to inspect and modify the internal structure of a PDF file

I never knew about the J number suffix in python: https://docs.python.org/3/reference/lexical_analysis.html#im... which it would appear is used to represent references: https://github.com/desgeeko/pdfsyntax/blob/main/tests/test_p...

I wish you good luck, this file format has tripped up many, many a developer. It blew up on a pdf I had lying around:

    ValueError: could not convert string to float: b'5.0.0'

• pdfquery

  3 753 0.0 Python

  A fast and friendly PDF scraping library.

On the field of PDF parsing, I think the most interesting project I encountered is pdfquery[1], where the PDF is parsed as a XML tree and you can use XPath to query it. There are issues when you put it into production work but the idea is like “why haven’t i thought of this” because PDF has some tree like structure.

[1]: https://github.com/jcushman/pdfquery

• InfluxDB

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• kaitai_struct_formats

  3 682 6.3 Kaitai Struct

  Kaitai Struct: library of binary file formats (.ksy)

  

This is tangential to your submission, but PDF is the file format I use for exercising any library that claims to be a declarative file format (ala https://github.com/kaitai-io/kaitai_struct_formats#readme )

• pdfplumber

  29 5,565 8.2 Python

  Plumb a PDF for detailed information about each char, rectangle, line, et cetera — and easily extract text and tables.

I recently tried pdfplumber [1] to extract tables from (relatively) difficult formatted tables in PDF, and it was a great experience. I can recommend it.

[1]: https://github.com/jsvine/pdfplumber

• i7j-rups

  3 248 5.3 Java

  RUPS is an acronym for Reading and Updating PDF Syntax. RUPS is a tool built on top of iText® that allows you to look inside a PDF document and browse the different PDF objects and content streams.

  

> find a version of iText RUPS application from somewhere on the internet

You mean this, right? https://github.com/itext/i7j-rups#readme

• WeasyPrint

  43 6,646 9.5 Python

  The awesome document factory

  

• PDF.js

  84 46,263 9.9 JavaScript

  PDF Reader in JavaScript

  

The PDF format is diverse enough for such a new project to still have plenty of incompatibilities. If you wanted to find many of them quickly, you might want to have a look at the documents used as test cases in other projects, such as pdf.js:

https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/tree/master/test/pdfs

• SaaSHub

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• bericht

  1 14 0.0 Python

  Incremental HTML to PDF converter.

  

• polyfile

  2 322 7.6 Python

  A pure Python cleanroom implementation of libmagic, with instrumented parsing from Kaitai struct and an interactive hex viewer

  

Be careful with PDF! There are many ambiguities in the specification that are implemented differently between parsers, as well as implicitly accepted malformations that almost all parsers will silently accept without warning. It is very easy to accidentally produce so-called file format schizophrenia: When the same file is rendered differently between two parsers. For example, with PDF, what if you have a PDF object stream that has a length that doesn't agree with the position of its `endstream` token? What if you have a PDF dictionary with duplicate keys? Do you use the value of the first key or the second? What if you have two, valid PDFs concatenated one after the other? Do you render the first or the second? What if an object in the XREF table has an incorrect offset?

Shameless plug: I am one of the maintainers of PolyFile, which, among other things, can produce an interactive HTML hex editor with an annotated syntax tree for dozens of filetypes, including PDF. For PDF, it uses a dynamically instrumented version of the PDFminer parser. It sounds like it might satisfy your use case.

https://github.com/trailofbits/polyfile

• djot

  43 1,580 5.8 HTML

  A light markup language

> the most reliable way of generating PDFs

See pandoc: https://pandoc.org/

And a variety of intermediate or input text formats, where you can pick your preferred poison whether for book publishing, research papers, math papers, technical documentation, slides, etc.

Including the author's own djot: https://github.com/jgm/djot

• pandoc

  420 32,396 9.8 Haskell

  Universal markup converter

> the most reliable way of generating PDFs

See pandoc: https://pandoc.org/

And a variety of intermediate or input text formats, where you can pick your preferred poison whether for book publishing, research papers, math papers, technical documentation, slides, etc.

Including the author's own djot: https://github.com/jgm/djot

• PyMuPDF

  5 4,053 9.8 Python

  PyMuPDF is a high performance Python library for data extraction, analysis, conversion & manipulation of PDF (and other) documents.

  

I think you might mean PyMuPDF (https://github.com/pymupdf/PyMuPDF), a Python library built on top of the MuPDF C library (https://mupdf.com/).

PyMuPDF and MuPDF are both available under dual open source AGPL and commercial licenses. They have been around for many years and are under continual development.

[Disclaimer, i work for Artifex, who wrote MuPDF and recently acquired PyMuPDF.]

• mupdf

  28 55 8.8 C

  mirrored from git://git.ghostscript.com/mupdf.git (by ccxvii)

I think you might mean PyMuPDF (https://github.com/pymupdf/PyMuPDF), a Python library built on top of the MuPDF C library (https://mupdf.com/).

PyMuPDF and MuPDF are both available under dual open source AGPL and commercial licenses. They have been around for many years and are under continual development.

[Disclaimer, i work for Artifex, who wrote MuPDF and recently acquired PyMuPDF.]

• annotated-pdf-spec

  1 5 10.0

  Collection of useful hints for implementing a PDF library

As others have already written, there are many slightly invalid PDF files out there in the wild that many readers can display mostly fine and which your library should also be able to handle.

If you can, grab yourself a copy of the most recent PDF 2.0 specification since it contains much more information and is much more correct in terms of how to implement things. Also have a look at the errata at https://pdf-issues.pdfa.org/32000-2-2020/index.html.

As I'm implementing a PDF library (in Ruby), I have started to collect some situations that arise in the wild but are not spec-compliant, see https://github.com/gettalong/annotated-pdf-spec. That might help you in parsing some invalid PDFs

• pdf-issues

  2 62 8.8

  Industry-based resolutions for issues and errata reported against any PDF-related specification

  

Merely for your consideration, if those were actual issues on that repo, (a) it would allow adding labels to them (as in https://github.com/pdf-association/pdf-issues/issues?q=is%3A... ) (b) folks could comment, acting as a low-rent stackoverflow, and (c) it would allow anyone to contribute new ones versus the "PR against README.md" situation right now

That also more closely matches the mental model of those items: bugs against the specification, whether the official PDF Association agrees that they are or not

• SaaSHub

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Suggest a related project