If you’ve ever worked with LaTeX, you know it’s an excellent tool for creating professional-quality documents. However, automating the process of converting LaTeX source files to PDFs can sometimes be a bit tedious, especially if you’re managing multiple files or need to integrate this process into a larger Python workflow.
In this tutorial, we’ll explore how to easily convert LaTeX documents into PDF files using a dedicated Python library that wraps the pdflatex
command.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Prerequisites
- Library Overview
- Creating a PDF from a .tex File
- Creating a PDF from a Binary String
- Additional Options and Cleanup
- Conclusion
Prerequisites
Before getting started, ensure that you have the necessary LaTeX packages installed on your system. If you encounter errors like “pdflatex not found”, run the following command (or its equivalent on your system):
sudo apt-get install texlive-latex-base texlive-latex-extra texlive-fonts-extra
This will install the essential LaTeX packages required for pdflatex
to function correctly.
Additionally, you’ll need Python installed along with the pdflatex
library. If you haven’t installed the library yet, you can typically do so via pip:
pip install pdflatex
Creating a PDF from a .tex File
Let’s start with the most straightforward use-case: generating a PDF from an existing .tex
file.
Begin by importing the PDFLaTeX class:
from pdflatex import PDFLaTeX
Instantiate from a .tex File using the helper method from_texfile
to create a PDFLaTeX
object:
pdfl = PDFLaTeX.from_texfile('my_file.tex')
Call the create_pdf
method. This method returns three things:
- The PDF file as a binary string.The log file generated by
pdflatex
as text.Asubprocess.CompletedProcess
object with detailed execution results
pdf, log, completed_process = pdfl.create_pdf(keep_pdf_file=True, keep_log_file=True)
The keep_pdf_file
and keep_log_file
parameters (both default to False
) allow you to retain the files on your filesystem if needed. Otherwise, the module cleans up after itself, leaving no trace unless explicitly requested.
Creating a PDF from a Binary String
There may be scenarios where your LaTeX content isn’t stored in a file but is generated dynamically (for instance, from a web template or user input). In such cases, you can create a PDF directly from a binary string.
import pdflatex
with open('my_file.tex', 'rb') as f:
pdfl = pdflatex.PDFLaTeX.from_binarystring(f.read(), 'my_file')
pdf, log, cp = pdfl.create_pdf()
The PDF is now available as a binary string which you can save to disk, serve via a web application, or further process as needed.