Converting An Image File Into PDF Using Python

#python #beginners #tutorial #programming

Introduction

Hello! 😎
In this tutorial I will show you how you can easily convert an image file into a PDF file easily using Python.

I recently had to do this for work so I thought I'd make my own tool. 😸

Creating The Virtual Environment

First we need to create a virtual environment, this is a practice I like doing because it doesn't interfere with the system packages.

Open up a terminal and type the following to create the virtual environment:

python3 -m venv env

Next active it with the following:

source env/bin/activate

Next we need to install the libraries required for the project, open up a file called "requirements.txt" and fill it with the following:

pillow
reportlab

Save and close the file and then run the following command to install the libraries:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Great now we can start coding. 😊

Creating The Converter

Now that we have the needed libraries installed we can now move onto actually coding the project. Open a file called "main.py" and first add the following imports:

from PIL import Image
from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas

Once we have imported the above, we next need to create a function that actually does the converting:

def image_to_pdf(image_path, output_pdf):
    # Open the image file
    with Image.open(image_path) as img:
        # Get image dimensions
        img_width, img_height = img.size

        # Create a new PDF with the same dimensions as the image
        c = canvas.Canvas(output_pdf, pagesize=(img_width, img_height))
        c.drawInlineImage(image_path, 0, 0, width=img_width, height=img_height)

        # Save the PDF file
        c.save()

I've decided to let the comments speak for themselves, basically we create a new PDF file with the same dimensions as the image passed.

Finally we can now called the main function:

if __name__ == "__main__":
    input_image = input("Enter the path of the image file: ")
    output_file = input("Enter the name for the output PDF file (e.g. output.pdf): ")

    image_to_pdf(input_image, output_file)
    print(f"PDF saved as {output_file}")