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

You could use Weasyprint. You could easily render directly.

You could do something like that:

    html = HTML(string=htmlstring)
    main_doc = html.render()
    pdf = main_doc.write_pdf()
    return HttpResponse(pdf, content_type='application/pdf')

To render your Django view to HTML, you could simply use the shortcut render_to_string(self.template_name, context, context_instance=RequestContext(self.request))

Be aware, when using This with a Synchronous Webserver/WSGI Server ALL requests will be blocked until the PDF is rendered. So consider using an ASYNC Worker.

Answer 2

I have tried pydf in Python3, its working fine.

pip install python-pdf

For python2 use pip install python-pdf==0.30.0

Documentation https://github.com/tutorcruncher/pydf

Answer 3

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<pk>[^/]+)/$', InvoicePDFView.as_view(), name='invoice')

Answer 4

wkhtmltopdf requires

• CSS to be inlined
• static files to be locally present on the server
• static file urls to be os paths, eg: /home/ubuntu/project/project/static/file_name