Adding content to existing PDFs with fpdf2

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fpdf2, the library I mentioned in my previous post, cannot parse existing PDF files.

However, other Python libraries can be combined with fpdf2 in order to add new content to existing PDF files.

This page provides several examples of doing so using pdfrw, a great zero-dependency pure Python library dedicated to reading & writing PDFs, with numerous examples and a very clean set of classes modelling the PDF internal syntax.

Adding content onto an existing PDF page

import sys
from fpdf import FPDF
from pdfrw import PageMerge, PdfReader, PdfWriter

IN_FILEPATH = sys.argv[1]
OUT_FILEPATH = sys.argv[2]
ON_PAGE_INDEX = 1
UNDERNEATH = False  # if True, new content will be placed underneath page (painted first)

def new_content():
    fpdf = FPDF()
    fpdf.add_page()
    fpdf.set_font("helvetica", size=36)
    fpdf.text(50, 50, "Hello!")
    reader = PdfReader(fdata=bytes(fpdf.output()))
    return reader.pages[0]

writer = PdfWriter(trailer=PdfReader(IN_FILEPATH))
PageMerge(writer.pagearray[ON_PAGE_INDEX]).add(new_content(), prepend=UNDERNEATH).render()
writer.write(OUT_FILEPATH)

Adding a page to an existing PDF

import sys
from fpdf import FPDF
from pdfrw import PdfReader, PdfWriter

IN_FILEPATH = sys.argv[1]
OUT_FILEPATH = sys.argv[2]
NEW_PAGE_INDEX = 1  # set to None to append at the end

def new_page():
    fpdf = FPDF()
    fpdf.add_page()
    fpdf.set_font("helvetica", size=36)
    fpdf.text(50, 50, "Hello!")
    reader = PdfReader(fdata=bytes(fpdf.output()))
    return reader.pages[0]

writer = PdfWriter(trailer=PdfReader(IN_FILEPATH))
writer.addpage(new_page(), at_index=NEW_PAGE_INDEX)
writer.write(OUT_FILEPATH)

This example relies on Pull Request #216 in order to be able to specify at_index (currently pdfrw only allows to append pages). Until it is merged, you can install a forked version of pdfrw including the required patch:

pip install git+https://github.com/PyPDF/pdfrw.git@addpage_at_index

Demo

In order to demonstrate this using an actual example, I first generated a PDF of the 1st code snippet above using the src2pdf bash function described in an old article on syntax coloring:


PDF Logo
add_on_page.pdf (PDF 1 page 30 Ko)

And then I added the following official Python logo to it:

Python logo

There is the new_content function I used:

def new_content():
    fpdf = FPDF()
    fpdf.add_page()
    fpdf.image("python-logo.png", x=0, y=120)
    reader = PdfReader(fdata=bytes(fpdf.output()))
    return reader.pages[0]

And there is the result: add_on_page_with_python_logo.pdf (41 Ko).

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