How to Create PDF using Python

Aspose.PDF for Python via .NET is a PDF manipulation API that allows developers to create, load, modify, and convert PDF files directly from Python for .NET applications with just a few lines of code.

How to Create Simple PDF File

To create a PDF using Python via .NET with Aspose.PDF, you can follow these steps:

1. Create an object of Document class
2. Add a Page object to the pages collection of the Document object
3. Add TextFragment to paragraphs collection of the page
4. Save the resultant PDF document

    import aspose.pdf as ap

    # Initialize document object
    document = ap.Document()
    # Add page
    page = document.pages.add()
    # Add text to new page
    page.paragraphs.add(ap.text.TextFragment("Hello World!"))
    # Save updated PDF
    document.save(output_pdf)

How to Create a Searchable PDF document

Aspose.PDF for Python via .NET allows creating and manipulating existing PDF documents. When adding Text elements to a PDF file, the resulting PDF is searchable. However, when converting an image containing text to a PDF file, the contents of the resulting PDF are not searchable. As a workaround, we can apply OCR to the resulting file so that it becomes searchable.

The following is the complete code to accomplish this requirement:

1. Load the PDF using ‘ap.Document’.
2. Configure rendering resolution.
3. Use ‘PngDevice.process’ to convert the selected PDF page into an image.
4. Run OCR on the generated image.
5. Create a new PDF from OCR output.
6. Save the searchable PDF.

    import aspose.pdf as ap
    import io
    # Requires: pip install pytesseract
    # Also ensure the Tesseract OCR engine is installed and available on your system PATH.
    import pytesseract
    from pathlib import Path


    # Path to the source PDF
    input_pdf_path = "input.pdf"
    # Path for the temporary image               
    temp_image_path = "temp_image.png" 
    # Path for the searchable PDF        
    output_pdf_path = "output_searchable.pdf"  
    page_number = 1
    image_stream = io.FileIO(temp_image_path, 'w')
    try:
        document = ap.Document(input_pdf_path)
        resolution = ap.devices.Resolution(300)
        png_device = ap.devices.PngDevice(resolution)
        png_device.process(document.pages[page_number], image_stream)
        image_stream.close()
        pdf = pytesseract.image_to_pdf_or_hocr(temp_image_path, extension='pdf')
        document = ap.Document(io.BytesIO(pdf))
        document.save(output_pdf_path)
    finally:
        image_file = Path(temp_image_path)
        image_file.unlink(missing_ok=True)