Create PDF Files in 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.

Use these examples when you need to generate new PDF files from scratch or convert OCR output into searchable PDF documents in Python.

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 sys
from os import path
import aspose.pdf as ap

def create_new_document(output_pdf):
    """Create a simple PDF with a single “Hello World!” page."""
    document = ap.Document()
    page = document.pages.add()
    page.paragraphs.add(ap.text.TextFragment("Hello World!"))
    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)

Related Document Topics

• Work with PDF documents in Python
• Format PDF documents in Python
• Manipulate PDF documents in Python
• Optimize PDF files in Python