Patrick Maupin created a package he called pdfrw and released it back in 2012. The pdfrw package is a pure-Python library that you can use to read and write PDF files. At the time of writing, pdfrw was at version 0.4. With that version, it supports subsetting, merging, rotating and modifying data in PDFs. The pdfrw package has been used by the rst2pdf package (see chapter 18) since 2010 because pdfrw can “faithfully reproduce vector formats without rasterization.” You can also use pdfrw in conjunction with ReportLab to re-use potions of existing PDFs in new PDFs that you create with ReportLab.
In this article, we will learn how to do the following: