This guide will help you run PDFTron samples and integrate a free trial of the PDFTron SDK into Python applications on Windows. Your free trial includes unlimited trial usage and support from solution engineers.

There are two ways to use PDFTron with Python:

• Use the precompiled library for Python 2.7.
• Use PDFNet bindings to build your own wrappers.

This guide will help you get started using the precompiled Python wrappers. You can find more information about building your own wrapper here.

Prerequisites

• Python 2.7.

  If you have multiple Python versions installed see the Troubleshooting.

• PDFTron's PDF library for Python on Windows:

64-bit Download32-bit Download

Initial setup

1. Make sure that Python 2.7 has been added to your path environment variable and that the executable name is python.exe.
2. Extract PDFNetWrappersWin64.zip or PDFNetWrappersWin32.zip.

Run the samples

Find and enter the Samples folder. Here you can find sample code for a large number of features supported by the PDFTron SDK.

Run a specific sample

1. Find the sample you want to run and navigate into the PYTHON folder inside.
2. Find RunTest.bat and run it. The results should appear on a cmd window.

Run all samples

1. Find runall_python.bat in the samples folder and double click on it to run it. The results should appear on a cmd window.

Integrate into your application

This is called the "PDFTron Hello World" application. It is easy to integrate the rest of PDFTron SDK if you are able to open, save and close a PDFDoc.

1. Create a new folder in Samples by the name HelloWorld.
2. In the HelloWorld folder, create a new file called HelloWorld.py, open and edit it using your favorite text editor.

3. Insert the following to your file:

   # You can use the following two lines to use PDFNetPython
   # in your solution from anywhere on your system
   # so long as you have relative path
   import site
   site.addsitedir("../../Lib")
   import sys
   
   # This is the most important packages to import
   # for basic document manipulation.
   from PDFNetPython import *
   
   def main():
   
       # You need to initialize the PDFNet library 
       # Before calling any PDF related methods
       PDFNet.Initialize()
   
       # This example creates a new document
       # and a new page, then adds the page
       # in the page sequence of the document
       doc = PDFDoc()
   
       page1 = doc.PageCreate()
       doc.pagePushBack(page1)
   
       # We save the document in a linearized
       # format which is the most popular and 
       # effective way to speed up viewing PDFs
       doc.Save(("linearized_output.pdf"), SDFDoc.e_linearized)
   
       doc.close()
   
   if __name__ == "__main__":
       main()

   To test that your code works, run the code using a shell in the HelloWorld folder using:

   python.exe -u HelloWorld.py

   Once you have successfully run this, you should see an output file in the working directory of this program.

Next step

Guides Samples

Troubleshooting

Multiple versions of Python
More information for conflict resolution between multiple Python installations.