can you add text to a PDF

[deadpengwen]

in pypdfium2 version 3 build there was an "insert_text()" method, i cant seem to find anything simular in the Version 4, is there a way to do this

Thanks

[mara004]

Unfortunately it had to be removed, see e.g. #160 (comment)
The code was based on a user-contributed sample to support Hindi using Harfbuzz text shaping, but

• This was very complex and probably inefficient¹ - pdfium has much simpler built-in functions for regular scripts
• The translation only accounted correctly for horizontal but not for vertical position, meaning it would only work for a subset of foreign scripts. IIRC there were more inaccuracies (e.g. more values not taken into account, mixup of APIs that should better be wrapped separately), and I was not sure how to fix this properly.

I'm hoping to add back a simpler insert_text() method based on pdfium's higher-level text API in the future.
If a contributor were able to fix and maintain the text shaping, it could also be added back as a separate function, say insert_text_foreign().

Note, if you want exactly the old implementation for some reason, you can always copy it into your project. It's really just a helper around pdfium's raw APIs that are also exposed publicly by the library.

Footnotes

1. due to several calls per char to two different C libraries ↩