How To Install Pypdf2 Python For Mac

Python is one of the most powerful, and beginner-friendly programming languages in the world. It can come as a surprise then, to discover just how complicated it can be to learn how to install. Using Python to Convert PDFs to Images: Extracting Data from PDF Files with PyPDF2. All the examples we've spoken about so far are Python wrappers for a much larger C or C codebase. With PyPDF2, the entire PDF manipulation logic is written only in Python. This means there is no need to install any other any other dependent libraries.

1. How To Install Pypdf2 Python For Mac Windows 7
2. How To Install Pypdf2 Python For Mac Download
3. Python Pypdf2 Example
4. How To Install Pypdf2 Python For Mac Windows 7

Bob Savage @mac.com>

• By being Pure-Python, it should run on any Python platform without any dependencies on external libraries. It can also work entirely on StringIO objects rather than file streams, allowing for PDF manipulation in memory. It is therefore a useful tool for websites that manage or manipulate PDFs.
• The official home of the Python Programming Language. While Javascript is not essential for this website, your interaction with the content will be limited.

Python on a Macintosh running Mac OS X is in principle very similar to Python onany other Unix platform, but there are a number of additional features such asthe IDE and the Package Manager that are worth pointing out.

4.1. Getting and Installing MacPython¶

Mac OS X 10.8 comes with Python 2.7 pre-installed by Apple. If you wish, youare invited to install the most recent version of Python 3 from the Pythonwebsite (https://www.python.org). A current 'universal binary' build of Python,which runs natively on the Mac's new Intel and legacy PPC CPU's, is availablethere.

What you get after installing is a number of things:

• A Python3.8 folder in your Applications folder. In hereyou find IDLE, the development environment that is a standard part of officialPython distributions; and PythonLauncher, which handles double-clicking Pythonscripts from the Finder.

• A framework /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework, which includes thePython executable and libraries. The installer adds this location to your shellpath. To uninstall MacPython, you can simply remove these three things. Asymlink to the Python executable is placed in /usr/local/bin/.

The Apple-provided build of Python is installed in/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework and /usr/bin/python,respectively. You should never modify or delete these, as they areApple-controlled and are used by Apple- or third-party software. Remember thatif you choose to install a newer Python version from python.org, you will havetwo different but functional Python installations on your computer, so it willbe important that your paths and usages are consistent with what you want to do.

IDLE includes a help menu that allows you to access Python documentation. If youare completely new to Python you should start reading the tutorial introductionin that document.

If you are familiar with Python on other Unix platforms you should read thesection on running Python scripts from the Unix shell.

4.1.1. How to run a Python script¶

Your best way to get started with Python on Mac OS X is through the IDLEintegrated development environment, see section The IDE and use the Help menuwhen the IDE is running.

If you want to run Python scripts from the Terminal window command line or fromthe Finder you first need an editor to create your script. Mac OS X comes with anumber of standard Unix command line editors, vim andemacs among them. If you want a more Mac-like editor,BBEdit or TextWrangler from Bare Bones Software (seehttp://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/index.html) are good choices, as isTextMate (see https://macromates.com/). Other editors includeGvim (http://macvim-dev.github.io/macvim/) and Aquamacs(http://aquamacs.org/).

To run your script from the Terminal window you must make sure that/usr/local/bin is in your shell search path.

To run your script from the Finder you have two options:

• Drag it to PythonLauncher

• Select PythonLauncher as the default application to open yourscript (or any .py script) through the finder Info window and double-click it.PythonLauncher has various preferences to control how your script islaunched. Option-dragging allows you to change these for one invocation, or useits Preferences menu to change things globally.

4.1.2. Running scripts with a GUI¶

With older versions of Python, there is one Mac OS X quirk that you need to beaware of: programs that talk to the Aqua window manager (in other words,anything that has a GUI) need to be run in a special way. Use pythonwinstead of python to start such scripts.

With Python 3.8, you can use either python or pythonw.

4.1.3. Configuration¶

Python on OS X honors all standard Unix environment variables such asPYTHONPATH, but setting these variables for programs started from theFinder is non-standard as the Finder does not read your .profile or.cshrc at startup. You need to create a file~/.MacOSX/environment.plist. See Apple's Technical Document QA1067 fordetails.

For more information on installation Python packages in MacPython, see sectionInstalling Additional Python Packages.

4.2. The IDE¶

MacPython ships with the standard IDLE development environment. A goodintroduction to using IDLE can be found athttp://www.hashcollision.org/hkn/python/idle_intro/index.html.

4.3. Installing Additional Python Packages¶

There are several methods to install additional Python packages:

• Packages can be installed via the standard Python distutils mode (pythonsetup.pyinstall).

• Many packages can also be installed via the setuptools extensionor pip wrapper, see https://pip.pypa.io/.

4.4. GUI Programming on the Mac¶

There are several options for building GUI applications on the Mac with Python.

PyObjC is a Python binding to Apple's Objective-C/Cocoa framework, which isthe foundation of most modern Mac development. Information on PyObjC isavailable from https://pypi.org/project/pyobjc/.

The standard Python GUI toolkit is tkinter, based on the cross-platformTk toolkit (https://www.tcl.tk). An Aqua-native version of Tk is bundled with OSX by Apple, and the latest version can be downloaded and installed fromhttps://www.activestate.com; it can also be built from source.

wxPython is another popular cross-platform GUI toolkit that runs natively onMac OS X. Packages and documentation are available from https://www.wxpython.org.

PyQt is another popular cross-platform GUI toolkit that runs natively on MacOS X. More information can be found athttps://riverbankcomputing.com/software/pyqt/intro.

4.5. Distributing Python Applications on the Mac¶

The standard tool for deploying standalone Python applications on the Mac ispy2app. More information on installing and using py2app can be foundat http://undefined.org/python/#py2app.

4.6. Other Resources¶

The MacPython mailing list is an excellent support resource for Python users anddevelopers on the Mac:

Another useful resource is the MacPython wiki:

by Mike Driscollintermediate

Watch Now This tutorial has a related video course created by the Real Python team. Watch it together with the written tutorial to deepen your understanding: How to Work With a PDF in Python

The Portable Document Format, or PDF, is a file format that can be used to present and exchange documents reliably across operating systems. While the PDF was originally invented by Adobe, it is now an open standard that is maintained by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). You can work with a preexisting PDF in Python by using the PyPDF2 package.

PyPDF2 is a pure-Python package that you can use for many different types of PDF operations.

By the end of this article, you'll know how to do the following: What is shader model 3.0.

• Extract document information from a PDF in Python
• Rotate pages
• Merge PDFs
• Split PDFs
• Add watermarks
• Encrypt a PDF

Let's get started!

Free Download:Get a sample chapter from Python Tricks: The Book that shows you Python's best practices with simple examples you can apply instantly to write more beautiful + Pythonic code.

History of pyPdf, PyPDF2, and PyPDF4#

The original pyPdf package was released way back in 2005. Adobe illustrator cs3 keygen for idm. The last official release of pyPdf was in 2010. After a lapse of around a year, a company called Phasit sponsored a fork of pyPdf called PyPDF2. The code was written to be backwards compatible with the original and worked quite well for several years, with its last release being in 2016.

There was a brief series of releases of a package called PyPDF3, and then the project was renamed to PyPDF4. All of these projects do pretty much the same thing, but the biggest difference between pyPdf and PyPDF2+ is that the latter versions added Python 3 support. There is a different Python 3 fork of the original pyPdf for Python 3, but that one has not been maintained for many years.

While PyPDF2 was recently abandoned, the new PyPDF4 does not have full backwards compatibility with PyPDF2. Most of the examples in this article will work perfectly fine with PyPDF4, but there are some that cannot, which is why PyPDF4 is not featured more heavily in this article. Feel free to swap out the imports for PyPDF2 with PyPDF4 and see how it works for you.

pdfrw: An Alternative#

Patrick Maupin created a package called pdfrw that can do many of the same things that PyPDF2 does. You can use pdfrw for all of the same sorts of tasks that you will learn how to do in this article for PyPDF2, with the notable exception of encryption.

The biggest difference when it comes to pdfrw is that it integrates with the ReportLab package so that you can take a preexisting PDF and build a new one with ReportLab using some or all of the preexisting PDF.

Installation#

Installing PyPDF2 can be done with pip or conda if you happen to be using Anaconda instead of regular Python.

Here's how you would install PyPDF2 with pip:

The install is quite quick as PyPDF2 does not have any dependencies. You will likely spend as much time downloading the package as you will installing it.

Now let's move on and learn how to extract some information from a PDF.

How to Extract Document Information From a PDF in Python#

You can use PyPDF2 to extract metadata and some text from a PDF. This can be useful when you're doing certain types of automation on your preexisting PDF files.

Here are the current types of data that can be extracted:

• Author
• Creator
• Producer
• Subject
• Title
• Number of pages

You need to go find a PDF to use for this example. You can use any PDF you have handy on your machine. To make things easy, I went to Leanpub and grabbed a sample of one of my books for this exercise. The sample you want to download is called reportlab-sample.pdf.

Let's write some code using that PDF and learn how you can get access to these attributes:

Here you importPdfFileReader from the PyPDF2 package. The PdfFileReader is a class with several methods for interacting with PDF files. In this example, you call .getDocumentInfo(), which will return an instance of DocumentInformation. This contains most of the information that you're interested in. You also call .getNumPages() on the reader object, which returns the number of pages in the document.

Note: That last code block uses Python 3's new f-strings for string formatting. If you'd like to learn more, you can check out Python 3's f-Strings: An Improved String Formatting Syntax (Guide).

The information variable has several instance attributes that you can use to get the rest of the metadata you want from the document. You print out that information and also return it for potential future use.

While PyPDF2 has .extractText(), which can be used on its page objects (not shown in this example), it does not work very well. Some PDFs will return text and some will return an empty string. When you want to extract text from a PDF, you should check out the PDFMiner project instead. PDFMiner is much more robust and was specifically designed for extracting text from PDFs.

Now you're ready to learn about rotating PDF pages.

How to Rotate Pages#

Occasionally, you will receive PDFs that contain pages that are in landscape mode instead of portrait mode. Or perhaps they are even upside down. This can happen when someone scans a document to PDF or email. You could print the document out and read the paper version or you can use the power of Python to rotate the offending pages.

For this example, you can go and pick out a Real Python article and print it to PDF.

Let's learn how to rotate a few of the pages of that article with PyPDF2:

For this example, you need to import the PdfFileWriter in addition to PdfFileReader because you will need to write out a new PDF. rotate_pages() takes in the path to the PDF that you want to modify. Within that function, you will need to create a writer object that you can name pdf_writer and a reader object called pdf_reader.

Next, you can use .GetPage() to get the desired page. Here you grab page zero, which is the first page. Then you call the page object's .rotateClockwise() method and pass in 90 degrees. Then for page two, you call .rotateCounterClockwise() and pass it 90 degrees as well.

Note: The PyPDF2 package only allows you to rotate a page in increments of 90 degrees. You will receive an AssertionError otherwise.

After each call to the rotation methods, you call .addPage(). This will add the rotated version of the page to the writer object. The last page that you add to the writer object is page 3 without any rotation done to it.

Finally you write out the new PDF using .write(). It takes a file-like object as its parameter. This new PDF will contain three pages. The first two will be rotated in opposite directions of each other and be in landscape while the third page is a normal page.

Now let's learn how you can merge multiple PDFs into one.

How to Merge PDFs#

There are many situations where you will want to take two or more PDFs and merge them together into a single PDF. For example, you might have a standard cover page that needs to go on to many types of reports. You can use Python to help you do that sort of thing.

For this example, you can open up a PDF and print a page out as a separate PDF. Then do that again, but with a different page. That will give you a couple of inputs to use for example purposes.

Let's go ahead and write some code that you can use to merge PDFs together:

You can use merge_pdfs() when you have a list of PDFs that you want to merge together. You will also need to know where to save the result, so this function takes a list of input paths and an output path.

Then you loop over the inputs and create a PDF reader object for each of them. Next you will iterate over all the pages in the PDF file and use .addPage() to add each of those pages to itself.

Once you're finished iterating over all of the pages of all of the PDFs in your list, you will write out the result at the end.

One item I would like to point out is that you could enhance this script a bit by adding in a range of pages to be added if you didn't want to merge all the pages of each PDF. If you'd like a challenge, you could also create a command line interface for this function using Python's argparse module.

Let's find out how to do the opposite of merging!

How to Split PDFs#

There are times where you might have a PDF that you need to split up into multiple PDFs. This is especially true of PDFs that contain a lot of scanned-in content, but there are a plethora of good reasons for wanting to split a PDF.

Here's how you can use PyPDF2 to split your PDF into multiple files:

In this example, you once again create a PDF reader object and loop over its pages. For each page in the PDF, you will create a new PDF writer instance and add a single page to it. Then you will write that page out to a uniquely named file. When the script is finished running, you should have each page of the original PDF split into separate PDFs.

Now let's take a moment to learn how you can add a watermark to your PDF.

How to Add Watermarks#

Watermarks are identifying images or patterns on printed and digital documents. Some watermarks can only be seen in special lighting conditions. The reason watermarking is important is that it allows you to protect your intellectual property, such as your images or PDFs. Another term for watermark is overlay.

You can use Python and PyPDF2 to watermark your documents. You need to have a PDF that only contains your watermark image or text.

Let's learn how to add a watermark now:

create_watermark() accepts three arguments:

1. input_pdf: the PDF file path to be watermarked
2. output: the path you want to save the watermarked version of the PDF
3. watermark: a PDF that contains your watermark image or text

In the code, you open up the watermark PDF and grab just the first page from the document as that is where your watermark should reside. Then you create a PDF reader object using the input_pdf and a generic pdf_writer object for writing out the watermarked PDF.

The next step is to iterate over the pages in the input_pdf. This is where the magic happens. You will need to call .mergePage() and pass it the watermark_page. When you do that, it will overlay the watermark_page on top of the current page. Then you add that newly merged page to your pdf_writer object.

Finally, you write the newly watermarked PDF out to disk, and you're done!

The last topic you will learn about is how PyPDF2 handles encryption.

How to Encrypt a PDF#

PyPDF2 currently only supports adding a user password and an owner password to a preexisting PDF. In PDF land, an owner password will basically give you administrator privileges over the PDF and allow you to set permissions on the document. On the other hand, the user password just allows you to open the document.

As far as I can tell, PyPDF2 doesn't actually allow you to set any permissions on the document even though it does allow you to set the owner password.

How To Install Pypdf2 Python For Mac Windows 7

Regardless, this is how you can add a password, which will also inherently encrypt the PDF:

add_encryption() takes in the input and output PDF paths as well as the password that you want to add to the PDF. It then opens a PDF writer and a reader object, as before. Since you will want to encrypt the entire input PDF, you will need to loop over all of its pages and add them to the writer.

The final step is to call .encrypt(), which takes the user password, the owner password, and whether or not 128-bit encryption should be added. The default is for 128-bit encryption to be turned on. If you set it to False, then 40-bit encryption will be applied instead.

Note: PDF encryption uses either RC4 or AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) to encrypt the PDF according to pdflib.com.

Just because you have encrypted your PDF does not mean it is necessarily secure. There are tools to remove passwords from PDFs. If you'd like to learn more, Carnegie Mellon University has an interesting paper on the topic.

Conclusion#

The PyPDF2 package is quite useful and is usually pretty fast. You can use PyPDF2 to automate large jobs and leverage its capabilities to help you do your job better!

In this tutorial, you learned how to do the following:

• Extract metadata from a PDF
• Rotate pages
• Merge and split PDFs
• Add watermarks
• Add encryption

Also keep an eye on the newer PyPDF4 package as it will likely replace PyPDF2 soon. You might also want to check out pdfrw, which can do many of the same things that PyPDF2 can do.

Further Reading#

If you'd like to learn more about working with PDFs in Python, you should check out some of the following resources for more information:

Watch Now This tutorial has a related video course created by the Real Python team. Watch it together with the written tutorial to deepen your understanding: How to Work With a PDF in Python

How To Install Pypdf2 Python For Mac Download

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About Mike Driscoll

Mike has been programming in Python for over a decade and loves writing about Python!

How To Install Pypdf2 Python For Mac Windows 7

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