Python3 Django -> HTML to PDF

Question

There are a lot of different ways of generating pdfs from a django webpage in python2. The most clean, probably, is pisa and reportlab. These do not work for python3 though.

Answer 1

I looked into Weasyprint, wkhtmltopdf and even LaTeX, but all have external binary dependencies that are difficult to deploy to services such as Heroku.

The best combination I found so far that works in Django on Python 3 is using Reportlab (now works on Python 3) + xhtml2pdf. xhtml2pdf only recently added beta Python 3 support so you need to install it with:

pip install --pre xhtml2pdf

If you have these two installed, you can either use xhtml2pdf directly or install the django-easy-pdf package which provides a TemplateView to inherit from and an example base template & styling to get you started quickly. Follow their quickstart instructions and you can quickly prepare something like a detail view that renders to PDF like:

class InvoicePDFView(PDFTemplateView):
    template_name = "invoice_pdf.html"

    def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
        context = super().get_context_data(**kwargs)
        myinstance = get_object_or_404(MyModel, pk=context['pk'])
        context['myinstance'] = myinstance
        return context

And in your urls.py you'd add something like:

url(r'invoice/(?P[^/]+)/$', InvoicePDFView.as_view(), name='invoice')