Welcome to Gerbil’s documentation!

Gerbil is a tool to simply watermark the bottom of existing PDF pages with a personalised text message - name and function inspired by those awesome folks at Pragmatic Programmers.

Installation

Gerbil is hosted on PyPi, but comes with a CLI, called, you guessed it gerbil.

To install simply run:

pip install gerbil

You make need to run

sudo pip install gerbil

if you run into permission errors.

Usage

Show me do works for me - should be self explanatory.

gerbil -i prioritisation-book.pdf \
       -o prioritisation-book-new.pdf \
       -t "Made lovingly by Gerbils" \
       -f Bliss-Regular.ttf

An explanation of the options can be shown by running:

gerbil --help

Which displays:

$ gerbil --help
Usage: gerbil [options]

Options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -t TEXT, --text=TEXT  The text to appear on footer the page.
  -f FONT, --font=FONT  The TrueType font file to be used (*.ttf)
  -a AUTHOR, --author=AUTHOR
                        The author to appear in metadata.
  -s SUBJECT, --subject=SUBJECT
                        The subject to appear in metadata.
  -i INPUT, --input=INPUT
                        The input file for the text to be added to.
  -o OUTPUT, --output=OUTPUT
                        The ouput file to be saved.
  -p PADDING, --padding=PADDING
                        The padding from the bottom of the page

Shortcomings

This is a scratch an itch for a project we’re doing at Action Agile at the moment. See below for things that need adding.

Currently Gerbil only supports adding text to the bottom of portrait oriented, unencrypted, unlocked, PDF’s in grey. Awesome isn’t it? :)

To Do

  1. Tests !!!!
  2. Options for paper sizes & orientation
  3. Different distances from bottomof page.
  4. Different colors.
  5. PDF Password support.
  6. PDF Meta data - currently hard wired.
  7. Better exception handling.