pdfbaker

Create PDF documents from YAML-configured SVG templates.

• Separation of design and content: Design your layout visually in SVG, while managing content and configuration in YAML.
• Instant templating: Turn any existing SVG into a configurable template with a single command.

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

Quickstart: Create templated PDF from an SVG

The fastest way to get started is with the --create-from option:

1. Design your document in an SVG editor or convert to SVG.

2. Run pdfbaker with --create-from to scaffold a new project and generate your first PDF:

   pdfbaker --create-from mydesign.svg myproject/myproject.yaml

   This will create a directory structure like:

   myproject
   ├── myproject.yaml
   └── mydesign
       ├── config.yaml
       ├── pages
       │   └── main.yaml
       └── templates
           └── main.svg.j2

   and produce your PDF in myproject/dist/mydesign/mydesign.pdf.

3. Edit the template and YAML files to customize your content and variables. This directory structure is just a starting point. Add more documents and customize as needed.

4. For future builds, just run:

   pdfbaker myproject/myproject.yaml

   to regenerate your PDFs.

Documentation

• Overview - Start here
• Usage - From the CLI or as a library
• Configuration Reference - All available settings
• Document Variants - Create multiple versions of the same document
• Custom Processing - Provide page content from anywhere

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

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.