Saturday, November 3, 2012

PDFBuilder can create composite PDFs


By Vasudev Ram

PDFBuilder is a tool to create composite PDFs, i.e. PDFs comprising of data from multiple different input data formats. It is a new component of my xtopdf toolkit for PDF generation.

At present, for input formats, PDFBuilder supports only CSV (Comma Separated Values, which can be exported from / imported to spreadsheets, among other things) and TDV / TSV (Tab Delimited Values / Tab Separated Values), which many UNIX / Linux tools like sed, grep, and awk, can create or process).

But support for more input formats can be added fairly easily, due to the design.

PDFBuilder is included in xtopdf v1.4 (just released on Bitbucket).

To try PDFBuilder:

- Download xtopdf v1.4, then follow the steps in the file README.txt; the steps include installing Python (>= v2.2), if you don't have it already, and Reportlab v1.21. (The steps for installing ReportLab are here.)

Then run this command:
python PDFBuilder.py output.pdf
This will create a composite PDF file, output.pdf, from two CSV files and two TDV files (interleaved). This is hard-coded as of now, but will be changed to take a list of input files from the command-line.

The download includes the 4 input files and the corresponding output PDF file.

Note: The xtopdf links on SourceForge and my site dancingbison.com have not yet been updated for xtopdf v1.4, so don't try to get v1.4 from there, for now.

You can read more about the ReportLab toolkit here.

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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