README.md

pdfbaker

Create PDF documents from YAML-configured SVG templates.

Quickstart

Installation

pdfbaker is available on PyPI and can be installed using pipx:

pipx install pdfbaker

If you don't have pipx yet, install it first:

sudo apt install pipx
pipx ensurepath

Windows Requirements

If you are using Windows, GTK needs to be installed: GTK for Windows Runtime Environment Installer

• Choose Install GTK+ libraries
• Tick to setup path (otherwise add the install dll folder manually)
• Choose your installation location
• Complete the installation

Optional Dependencies

• For SVG to PDF conversion, CairoSVG is used by default. If you need Inkscape instead, install it:

  sudo apt install inkscape

• For PDF compression, install Ghostscript:

  sudo apt install ghostscript

• If your templates embed particular fonts, they need to be installed. For example for Roboto fonts:

  sudo apt install fonts-roboto

Basic Usage

1. Create your document design in an SVG editor
2. Replace text with variables using Jinja2 (e.g., {{ title }})
3. Configure your content in YAML
4. Generate PDFs with:

pdfbaker <config_file>

This will produce your PDF files in a dist/ directory where your configuration file lives. It will also create a build/ directory with intermediate files, which is only kept if you specify --keep-build-files (or --debug).

Examples

For working examples, see the examples directory:

• minimal - Basic usage
• regular - Standard features
• variants - Document variants
• custom_locations - Custom file/directory locations
• custom_processing - Custom processing with Python

Create all PDFs with:

pdfbaker examples/examples.yaml

Documentation

• Overview - Start here
• Configuration Reference - All available settings
• Document Variants - Create multiple versions of the same document
• Custom Processing - Provide page content from anywhere

( on GitHub )

Development

All source code is on GitHub.

This project uses uv for dependency management. The uv.lock file ensures reproducible builds.

Create and activate the virtual environment:

uv venv
source .venv/bin/activate

Install development dependencies:

uv sync --dev

Tests

Run tests:

pytest

View test coverage:

pytest --cov=pdfbaker --cov-report=term-missing

Pre-commit hook

If you want to commit changes, install pre-commit (maybe using uv) and run

pre-commit install

This ensures the same checks run locally as in GitHub CI.