---
id: pdfservices-sdk
version: "4.3.0"
license: Apache2
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: active
---

# pdfservices-sdk — Adobe PDFServices Client Library

License: permissive · Maintenance: active · Downloads: 350.8K/mo

## What it is and what it does

This is Adobe's official Python client for the PDF Services API, a cloud-based REST service for PDF operations. It wraps Adobe's remote PDF processing capabilities—document generation from templates, format conversion (PDF to Word/Excel/PowerPoint/image formats), OCR, text/image/table extraction, compression, security, page manipulation, and metadata inspection—into a Python library you call locally. The SDK handles authentication, request marshalling, and response parsing.

You use it by obtaining free API credentials from Adobe, instantiating a client with those credentials, and calling methods to submit PDF jobs to Adobe's servers. The service itself is cloud-hosted; the SDK is just the Python interface. It's suitable for applications that need reliable, feature-rich PDF processing without maintaining your own document conversion infrastructure, though you depend on Adobe's API availability and any usage limits or costs they impose.

Use it for:

- Generate invoices or reports as PDFs from Word templates populated with application data.
- Convert uploaded PDFs to editable Word or Excel formats for user download.
- Extract text and tables from scanned PDFs to feed into data pipelines or search systems.
- Secure PDFs with passwords and permission restrictions before distribution.
- Combine or split multi-page PDFs as part of document workflow automation.
- Reduce PDF file sizes via compression for faster web delivery or email attachment.

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

Client library for Adobe PDF Services API, enabling programmatic creation, conversion, manipulation, and extraction of PDFs through REST endpoints.

Yes, if you need reliable, feature-rich PDF operations and can accept a cloud dependency. The SDK is actively maintained, has no known vulnerabilities, low install friction, and permissive licensing. Trade-off: you depend on Adobe's API availability and must obtain credentials; check Adobe's usage limits and pricing for your scale before committing.

## Install

pip install pdfservices-sdk
uv add pdfservices-sdk
poetry add pdfservices-sdk

## Installing pdfservices-sdk

Before you install: Low friction installation as a pure Python wheel. Actively maintained with a release 4 days old. Requires Python 3.10 or higher and depends on requests, sphinx, sphinx-rtd-theme, and defusedxml.

License in practice: Licensed under Apache 2.0 (permissive), allowing use in commercial and open-source projects with minimal restrictions beyond attribution and liability disclaimers.

Quickstart:

pip install pdfservices-sdk

from pdfservices_sdk import PDFServices

# Requires Adobe PDF Services API credentials (free tier available)
services = PDFServices(client_id='...', client_secret='...')
# Use services to call PDF operations (create, convert, extract, etc.)

Requires Adobe PDF Services API credentials (obtainable free at Adobe's developer portal); Python 3.10 or higher.

Verify before relying:

- Whether the SDK's free tier has meaningful rate limits or feature restrictions beyond what the description states.
- Whether sphinx and sphinx-rtd-theme are runtime dependencies or only documentation build tools that could be optional.

## Package facts

- License: Apache2 (permissive)
- Python support: supports_current
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: active
- Downloads: 350.8K/month (top 15,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

pdf generation from templates, pdf to word conversion, ocr pdf text extraction, pdf compression and security, adobe pdf services api client, pdf document manipulation, batch pdf processing, pdf-processing, cloud-api-client, document-generation

[View on SkillFed](https://skillfed.io/packages/pdfservices-sdk) · [View on PyPI](https://pypi.org/project/pdfservices-sdk/)