fpdf2¶

fpdf2 is a library for simple & fast PDF document generation in Python. It is a fork and the successor of PyFPDF (cf. history).

Latest Released Version:

from fpdf import FPDF

pdf = FPDF()
pdf.add_page()
pdf.set_font('helvetica', size=12)
pdf.cell(text="hello world")
pdf.output("hello_world.pdf")

Go try it now online in a Jupyter notebook: or

Main features¶

Easy to use, with a user-friendly API, and easy to extend
Python 3.8+ support
Unicode (UTF-8) TrueType font subset embedding (Central European, Cyrillic, Greek, Baltic, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi and almost any other language in the world)
Internal / external links
Embedding images, including transparency and alpha channel, using Pillow (Python Imaging Library)
Arbitrary path drawing and basic SVG import
Embedding barcodes, charts & graphs, emojis, symbols & dingbats
Tables, and also cell / multi-cell / plaintext writing, with automatic page breaks, line break and text justification
Choice of measurement unit, page format & margins. Optional page header and footer
Basic conversion from HTML to PDF
A templating system to render PDFs in batchs
Images & links alternative descriptions, for accessibility
Table of contents & document outline
Document encryption & document signing
Annotations, including text highlights, and file attachments
Presentation mode with control over page display duration & transitions
Optional basic Markdown-like styling: **bold**, __italics__
It has very few dependencies: Pillow, defusedxml, & fonttools
Can render mathematical equations & charts
Many example scripts available throughout this documentation, including usage examples with Django, Flask, FastAPI, streamlit, AWS lambdas... : Usage in web APIs
more than 1300 unit tests with qpdf-based PDF diffing, and PDF samples validation using 3 different checkers:

Tutorials¶

Installation¶

From PyPI:

pip install fpdf2

To get the latest, unreleased, development version straight from the development branch of this repository:

pip install git+https://github.com/py-pdf/fpdf2.git@master

Developement: check the dedicated documentation page.

Displaying deprecation warnings¶

DeprecationWarnings are not displayed by Python by default.

Hence, every time you use a newer version of fpdf2, we strongly encourage you to execute your scripts with the -Wd option (cf. documentation) in order to get warned about deprecated features used in your code.

This can also be enabled programmatically with warnings.simplefilter('default', DeprecationWarning).

Community¶

Support¶

For community support, please feel free to file an issue or open a discussion.

They use fpdf2¶

Online classes & open source projects:

Harvard University uses fpdf2 in their CS50 introductory class
Undying Dusk : a video game in PDF format, with a gameplay based on exploration and logic puzzles, in the tradition of dungeon crawlers
OpenDroneMap : a command line toolkit for processing aerial drone imagery
OpenSfM : a Structure from Motion library, serving as a processing pipeline for reconstructing camera poses and 3D scenes from multiple images
RPA Framework : libraries and tools for Robotic Process Automation (RPA), designed to be used with both Robot Framework : rpa-pdf package
Concordia : a platform developed by the US Library of Congress for crowdsourcing transcription and tagging of text in digitized images
wudududu/extract-video-ppt : create a one-page-per-frame PDF from a video or PPT file. fpdf2 also has a demo script to convert a GIF into a one-page-per-frame PDF: gif2pdf.py
Planet-Matriarchy-RPG-CharGen : a PyQt based desktop application (= .exe under Windows) that provides a RPG character sheet generator

Usage statistics¶

PyPI download stats - Downloads per release on Pepy
pip trends: fpdf2 VS other PDF rendering libs
packages using fpdf2 can be listed using:

Looking for alternative libraries? Check out pypdf, borb, pikepdf, WeasyPrint, pydyf and PyMuPDF: features comparison, examples, Jupyter notebooks. We have some documentations about combining fpdf2 with borb & pypdf.
Create PDFs with Python : a series of tutorial videos by bvalgard
GitHub gist providing borders around any fpdf2 area, by @hyperstown
digidigital/Extensions-and-Scripts-for-pyFPDF-fpdf2 : scripts ported from PHP to add transpareny to elements of the page or part of an image, allow to write circular text, draw pie charts and bar diagrams, embed JavaScript, draw rectangles with rounded corners, draw a star shape, restrict the rendering of some elements to screen or printout, paint linear / radial / multi-color gradients gradients, add stamps & watermarks, write sheared text...

Misc¶

Release notes: CHANGELOG.md
This library could only exist thanks to the dedication of many volunteers around the world: list & map of contributors
You can download an offline PDF version of this manual: fpdf2-manual.pdf