pdfpecker for Python

Fast HTML and Markdown to PDF, and PDF to images and text, for Python. No browser, no dependencies, no .NET to install.

pip install pdfpecker

import pdfpecker

pdf = pdfpecker.html_to_pdf("<h1>Invoice 42</h1><p>Total: <b>1,250.00 EUR</b></p>")
pdfpecker.html_file_to_pdf("templates/invoice.html", "invoice.pdf")     # images and CSS resolve next to the file
pdfpecker.markdown_file_to_pdf("README.md", "readme.pdf")

pngs = pdfpecker.pdf_to_images(pdf, dpi=96)        # one PNG per page (or format="jpeg"/"webp")
text = pdfpecker.pdf_to_text(pdf)                  # pages separated by \f
both = pdfpecker.merge_pdfs([pdf, "terms.pdf"])

This is the PdfPecker .NET library, compiled ahead of time into a native library that ships inside the wheel. PdfPecker has its own HTML parser, CSS engine, layout engine, PDF writer and PDF renderer, so a conversion takes about a millisecond for a one-page invoice and never starts a browser. The package version is the library version it holds. Documentation of what PdfPecker renders, its CSS support and its limitations: pdfpecker.net/docs.

Platforms

Wheels for Linux (glibc 2.28+ and musl, x86-64 and ARM64), macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Windows (x64 and ARM64), on Python 3.9 and later. Each wheel is about 9 MB and has no Python or system dependencies.

Speed

From Python, on a 4-core Linux cloud VM, median time per document after warm-up; the documents are the benchmark pages of the PdfPecker repository:

API

Every function takes bytes or a path for PDFs, raises a subclass of PdfPeckerError on failure, is thread-safe and releases the GIL while it works, so threads convert in parallel.

... View full README on GitHub