Idea for new bindings project: Apache PDFBox JPype API bindings

[mara004]

Hi community,

as a related project of interest, I started to experiment with JPype API bindings to Apache PDFBox.
Like pdfium, it is (I think) liberal-licensed and can render PDFs.

Currently, all Python pdfbox bindings known to me use the CLI, either via subprocess (pdf2jpg), or by calling CLI entrypoint functions (python-pdfbox).¹ This has some disadvantages, e.g. callers are restricted to a few pre-defined workflows, all memory transfer needs to go through files, etc. Using subprocess leads to further performance drawbacks.

I now wrote a small gist that uses the actual pdfbox API with JPype, showing init, rendering, buffer transfer, and PIL image retrieval: https://gist.github.com/mara004/51c3216a9eabd3dcbc78a86d877a61dc

This makes me wonder if it would be possible to create a similar bindings project like pypdfium2 for pdfbox,
i.e. a setup infrastructure to download/bundle a PDFBox Jar, and a set of helpers & tests.
Setup should be easier because it's just one Jar, not platform specific binaries.

However, I'm afraid my work load is high and I may not be able to cope with a second bindings project, but wanted to share the idea here.

Footnotes

1. None of which seem to be actively maintained, though ↩

[mara004]

See also https://gist.github.com/mara004/881d0c5a99b8444fd5d1d21a333b70f8