TDDPirate's Ideas

When I asked the above question in a Telegram group, people proposed also other tools, which I am summarizing below.
Amiad Bareli, Amit Aronovitch, Meir Gil and Yehuda Deutsch – thanks.

1. ImageMagick compare
2. matplotlib testing framework – supports also PDF:

   >>> import matplotlib.testing.compare
   >>> matplotlib.testing.compare.comparable_formats()
   ['png', 'eps', 'svg', 'pdf']

   • github: matplotlib / pytest-mpl – a pytest plugin to faciliate image comparison for Matplotlib figures.
3.  pHash – The open source perceptual hash library.
   • github: philipbl / duplicate-images – an example of pHash usage.

I have an application written in Python, which uses the ReportLab package for exporting PDF files.

Of course, the application needs to be tested. Among other tests, the PDF export function needs to be tested to ensure that the visual rendering of PDF files did not unexpectedly change.

Since it is possible to create and save an expected-results PDF file using fabricated test data, the above implies the need to compare two PDF files. It turns out that two PDF files created from the same data at two different dates – are different, due to embedded timestamps.

Hence, the need to compare visual renderings of the PDF files. ImageMagick’s convert knows how to convert PDF files into PNG. However, one needs to set the background and remove the alpha channel.

convert knows also to perform bitwise XOR on two image files, but it must be told how to compute the bitwise XOR. This is documented in StackOverflow: Searching for a way to do Bitwise XOR on images.

The script in  https://gitlab.com/TDDPirate/compare_pdfs implements all the above.

Do you use reportlab for creating PDF files from your Django application, as instructed in Outputting PDFs with Django?
Do you wish to add your own font files?
Do you need to render Hebrew text?

If yes, the following information will help you.

When installed in a virtualenv, as recommended by good working practices, reportlab searches for font files it uses in your virtualenv/lib/python3.x/site-packages/reportlab/fonts and it is not good idea to add your own font files there.

Instead, add your font files to your_project_root_directory/reportlab_extra_fonts where your_project_root_directory is where your project’s manage.py is located. Add the following to any Python script that uses reportlab (usually views.py), after all regular reportlab import and configuration statements.
# The following configures extra reportlab fonts.
import os
from django.conf import settings
reportlab.rl_config.TTFSearchPath.append(os.path.join(settings.BASE_DIR, 'reportlab_extra_fonts'))
from reportlab.pdfbase import pdfmetrics
from reportlab.pdfbase.ttfonts import TTFont
HEBREW_FONT_NAME = 'your_font_name'
pdfmetrics.registerFont(TTFont(HEBREW_FONT_NAME, 'your_font_file_name.ttf'))
# The above configures extra reportlab fonts.
If you want to properly display Hebrew in your PDF file (the probable reason why you needed to add your own fonts in the first place), you need to convert the text yourself from logical ordering to visual ordering, because reportlab (as of version 3.4.0) does not currently process BiDi text. For this purpose, install the python-bidi package in your virtualenv (using pip install python-bidi) and add the following import statement to your views.py script:
from bidi.algorithm import get_display
Now, get_display() will reorder your BiDi text.