Following last week animated PDF adventure, I have been reading a series of one page dungeons... And yesterday I had the opportunity to play the best one in my opinion: The Sky-Blind Spire by Michael Prescott.

It has everythng I love on one page: a maze to explore, mysteries to …

Last week, while translating John Harper's micro-TTRPG World of Dungeons: Turbo Breakers, I discovered the wonderful world of one page dungeons, starting with Michael Prescott splendid production at trilemma.com and also the yearly One Page Dungeon Context.

While crawling through the OPDC 2021 entries, I discovered a great map …

fpdf2 is a simple & fast PDF creation library for Python that I have been maintaining since mid-2020.

In this article, I'm going to present some of the new features that landed since my last post on the subject. Hence, this will cover versions 2.5.0, 2.5.1 & 2 …

Added

• new parameters new_x and new_y for cell() and multi_cell(), replacing ln=0, thanks to @gmischler
• new add_highlight() method to insert highlight annotations: documentation
• new offset_rendering() method: documentation
• new .text_mode property: documentation
• the page structure of the documentation has been revised, with a new page about adding text, thanks to @gmischler
• a warning is now raised if a context manager is used inside an unbreakable() section, which is not supported

Changed

• local_context() can now "scope" even more properties, like blend_mode: documentation

Fixed

• No font properties should be leaked anymore after using markdown or in any other situations (cf. #359), thanks to @gmischler
• If multi_cell(align="J") is given text with multiple paragraphs (text followed by an empty line) at once, it now renders the last line of each paragraph left-aligned,
  instead of just the very last line (cf. #364), thanks to @gmischler
• a regression: now again multi_cell() always renders a cell, even if txt is an empty string - cf. #349
• a bug with string width calculation when Markdown is enabled - cf. #351
• a few bugs when parsing some SVG files - cf. #356, #358 & #376
• a bug when using multi_cell(..., split_only=True) inside an unbreakable section - cf. #359

Deprecated

• The parameter ln to cell() and multi_cell() is now deprecated, use new_x and new_y instead.
• The parameter center to cell() is now deprecated, use align="C" instead.

Displaying deprecation warnings

DeprecationWarnings are not displayed by Python by default.

Hence, every time you use a newer version of fpdf2, we strongly encourage you to execute your scripts
with the -Wd option (cf. documentation)
in order to get warned about deprecated features used in your code.

This can also be enabled programmatically with warnings.simplefilter('default', DeprecationWarning).

Last month, I realized late that October was hacktoberfest month!

This online event is a month-long celebration (October 1-31) of open source software run in partnership with different software companies, with a focus on encouraging contributions to open source projects.

While I participated in the 2019 edition as a contributor …

cf. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier_de_test_Eicar

X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

FROM: https://sebsauvage.net/links/?0rGdAQ

Pour vous amuser à en créer en Python, avec fpdf2:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# REQUIRE: pip install fpdf2 pdf417 qrcode
import fpdf, pdf417, qrcode
EICAR = 'X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*'
pdf = fpdf.FPDF()
pdf.add_page()
pdf.set_font("Helvetica", size=30)
pdf.text(90, 20, "EICAR")
pdf.text(10, 60, "PDF-417:")
pdf.image(pdf417.render_image(pdf417.encode(EICAR)), x=10, y=60)
pdf.text(10, 140, "QRCode:")
pdf.image(qrcode.make(EICAR).get_image(), x=35, y=145)
pdf.output("eicar.pdf")

I have been amazed recently at the diversity of contributors on the fpdf2 project, coming from all around the world!

Then I thought it would be nice to visualize this diversity by building a world map of all contributors locations. There it is:

Click on the image to access an …

fpdf2 is a minimalist PDF creation library for Python that I am maintaining.

With the release yesterday of its v2.4.0, I'm going to present some of its notable new features since the latest minor version.

https://github.com/pyfpdf/fpdf2/ Doc: https://pyfpdf.github.io/fpdf2/

JPEG images …

Today, I am happy to announce version 2.3.0 of fpdf2, code name: Unbreakable!

https://github.com/pyfpdf/fpdf2/ Doc: https://pyfpdf.github.io/fpdf2/

Why Unbreakable?

• As a tribute to M. Night Shyamalan movie
• Because using fpdf2, your Python code can never break!
  ...
  Just kidding, I would be …

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 …