Intro

This aims to create a pip package for iText 9 distribution

Installation

.NET Core is required for building the package and the dotnet tool should be available in PATH.

To install the experimental itextpy package in your Python environment, execute this command at the root of the repository:

pip install .

This will include all the necessary .NET binaries, together with the typing stubs for IDE auto-completion.

If you just want to build the itextpy wheel without installing it, you can do that with the build package:

pip install build
python -m build --wheel

This will create the itextpy wheel in the dist directory.

Usage

# Uncomment this block, if you wish to force the .NET Core runtime
# import pythonnet
# pythonnet.load('coreclr')

# Load the .NET binaries
# Any .NET runtime configuration should be done before the load call
import itextpy
itextpy.load()

# Use as any regular Python package
from iText.Kernel.Pdf import PdfWriter, PdfDocument
from iText.Layout import Document
from iText.Layout.Element import Paragraph

writer = PdfWriter("test.pdf")
pdf_doc = PdfDocument(writer)
document = Document(pdf_doc)
document.Add(Paragraph("Hello, World!"))
document.Close()

More source code examples are available in the samples directory.

Limitations

• .NET Core SDK is required for building.
• Typing information is auto-generated from binaries via the pythonnet-stub-generator. Ideally we would want to have docs transferred as well and be able to patch the tool output manually, if needed.
• As of Python.NET 3.0.5 you cannot override protected methods within Python. To overcome this limitation, we include a small itext.python.compat library. It includes subclasses, which wraps protected methods into overridable public ones.
• Dependencies are taken from NuGet and dependency resolution is handled by the .NET Core SDK. To control the versions of the dependencies, modify them in Directory.Packages.props.
• Only the following packages are included:
  • itext
  • itext.bouncy-castle-adapter
  • itext.pdfhtml
• Current 9.1.0 build contains a bug, which prevents running iText with .NET Core under Python.NET. For now, we have a workaround here with a binary patch. Patching is done with the scripts/patch_itext_binaries.py script. So don't worry, if the itext.io.dll binary differs from the one from NuGet.