Adding text annotations to a page

[nicholasbailey87]

Thanks so much for the excellent library. I'd like to add "sticky note" text annotations to a PDF page and have been trying to work out how to do it all day. I've tried a million variations along the theme shown below.

Is there a way to do this with pikepdf at the moment, and if so can you please give me a hint about the basic pattern? Thank you for your help! If I can contribute in any way (writing documentation for the correct approach, making a pull request with some utility functions for accomplishing this, etc.) please let me know.

import pikepdf

example = pikepdf.Pdf.open('samples.pdf')

page = example.pages[0]

page_ref = f"{page_object.objgen[0]} {page_object.objgen[1]} R"

note_dict = {
    "/Type": "/Annot",
    "/Subtype": "/Text",
    "/Rect": [100, 100, 125, 125],
    "/C": [0.97, 0.98, 0.31], # yellow
    "/Contents": "Test comment",
    "/P": page_ref,
    "/Name": "Help",
    "/T": "Joe Bloggs"
}

new_annotation = pikepdf.Annotation(pikepdf.Dictionary(note_dict))

page.Annots.append(new_annotation)

example.save('../samples/output.pdf')

example.close()

[jbarlow83]

I believe you need page_ref = page.obj

[nicholasbailey87]

Thank you so much for your quick response! I've made the change you suggested. My code is now exactly as shown below.

I'm running it on mariner_from_word.pdf and the intended comment is not appearing on the first page. Also, if I delete the comment that already exists on the first page (so that there are no annotations on that page to begin with) I get AttributeError: /Annots from page.Annots.append(new_annotation.obj).

Maybe I need more stuff in my note_dict? I haven't specified an appearance dictionary for example. The other comment on the same page has a pop-up annotation, which I also haven't made.

import pikepdf

example = pikepdf.Pdf.open('../samples/mariner_from_word.pdf')

page = example.pages[0]

page_ref = page.obj

note_dict = {
    "/Type": "/Annot",
    "/Subtype": "/Text",
    "/Rect": [100., 100., 125., 125.],
    "/Contents": "Test comment",
    "/P": page_ref,
    "/C": (0.97, 0.98, 0.31),
    "/Name": "Help",
    "/T": "Joe Bloggs"
}

new_annotation = pikepdf.Annotation(pikepdf.Dictionary(note_dict))

page.Annots.append(new_annotation.obj)

example.save('../samples/output.pdf')

example.close()

[jbarlow83]

I think you may need page.Annots = Array() to create the empty array first, before appending to it.

[nicholasbailey87]

Adding

if not "/Annots" in page:
    page["/Annots"] = pikepdf.Array()

avoids the AttributeError: /Annots when trying to append an annotation to a page with no pre-existing annotations - thanks for that. However I still have the main, original problem that no annotation appears in the document.

[jbarlow83]

You'll have to excuse me, I'm ridiculously busy with regular work and can't dig into issues right now.

Maybe have a look at https://pypi.org/project/pikepdf-annots/ (a third party annotations package) to see if there's a coding pattern in there you can follow.

[PeterSlezak]

I had a similar problem where I wanted to add a link annotation which is very similar to the above problem. I made it work so if anyone is interested, the below code adds the text annotation "sticky note" that @nicholasbailey87 wanted (annotation was visible on the first page when I opened the output file in adobe acrobat).

import pikepdf

example = pikepdf.Pdf.open('../samples/mariner_from_word.pdf')
page = example.pages[0]
page_ref = page.obj

if not "/Annots" in page:
    page["/Annots"] = pikepdf.Array()

note_dict = {
    "/Type": pikepdf.Name.Annot,
    "/Subtype": pikepdf.Name.Text,
    "/Rect": [100., 100., 125., 125.],
    "/Contents": "Test comment",
    "/P": page_ref,
    "/C": (0.97, 0.98, 0.31),
    "/Name": "Help",
    "/T": "Joe Bloggs"
}

new_annotation = pikepdf.Annotation(pikepdf.Dictionary(note_dict))
page.Annots.append(new_annotation.obj)
example.save('../samples/output.pdf')
example.close()