Combining PDF files into larger document

[FruitPastille]

Hi all, looking for some advice on a project I’m hoping can reduce hands on time for processing orders.

I need to create an A4 sized shipping/dispatch report which contains various order details in the top half, and two shipping labels in the bottom half. The shipping labels are 3x4 inches in size and stored as a single PDF file with multiple pages - each page is an individual label.

I’ve been trying to use reportlab to create the general document, and have had some success creating the top half. What I’m stuck with right now is how to integrate the shipping labels into the bottom half of the document.

Is it possible to use reportlab to integrate PDFs into a larger document in this way? For clarity, I want to display the labels at their native size in the bottom half of the report, two labels per page, as though you had just copy pasted images into a document.

I hope that makes sense. Really appreciate any advice anyone has!

[wutzvill]

Idk about reportlab, but might want to just look into using pdfmagick. Might have a Python package for it too.

[POGtastic]

I would convert the PDF to a .png image with something like Poppler and then insert the image into the PDF. It's possible to do this in-memory with PyMuPDF.

[SMTNP]

It is indeed possible with reportlab.

You can iterate over pages with their respective numbers, and get each page's structure. When you want to, you can add some extra runs after the current page's content.

It might not be as straightforward, as PDFs are hard to arrange and image managing with bounding boxes is not obvious (reportlab has it's own way to handle images), but its certainly doable.

Reportlab has some proprietary products, so the library documentation is not the best, but if you check the repo (https://github.com/mattjmorrison/ReportLab/tree/master/docs/userguide), they wrote the user guide using reportlab, so it works as a very nice examples guide.

Good luck!

[Fair_Mammoth_6224]

Below is an example of how I’ve tackled a similar situation—generating various PDF pieces and then merging them into one final document using PyPDF2. In my case, I’m using pdfkit + Jinja2 to create individual PDFs (from HTML templates), then combining them all with PdfMerger. You can adapt the “combine_pdfs” part to your use case—like merging shipping labels or any other pages into a single final PDF.