December 27, 2021

How to Grep in PDF Documents

The end of the year usually also means having some fun with the tax declaration. One of the tedious tasks is to match payments for insurances with bank statements. As all my bank statements are PDF documents, I wondered how to search/grep in them. pdfgrep for the rescue Turns out there is pdfgrep, which you might need to install via sudo apt install pdfgrep or similar, depending on your operating system....

January 19, 2021

Which Image Formats Are Supported by ReportLab's PDF Library

ReportLab is an open source library for generating PDFs, written in Python. While ReportLab is absolutely battle tested, even Wikipedia uses it for PDF generation, documentation lacks a bit. I could not find a reliable source for supported image formats. Also, there is both an open source and a commercial license for ReportLab, with different feature sets. The latter one is supposed to be able to treat PDFs as image files, which then can be embedded....