Intro

This aims to create a pip package for iText 9 distribution

Build

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

To build the package, just run:

python -m build --wheel

which should create a file:

./dist/itextpy-9.1.0-py3-none-any.whl

that then you can install by using

pip install ./dist/itextpy-9.1.0-py3-none-any.whl --force-reinstall

This package includes both the binaries and the typing stubs for IDE auto-completion.

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()

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 library version, modify package versions within 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 prevent running iText with .NET Core under Python.NET. For now we have a workaround here with a binary patch. Patch is done with the scripts/patch_itext_binaries.py script. So the itext.io.dll binary is not the same, as the one from NuGet.