Render HTML to PDF in Django site
For my django powered site, I am looking for an easy solution to convert dynamic html pages to pdf.
Pages include HTML and charts from Google visualization API (which is javascript based, yet including those graphs is a must).
Answer
Try the solution from Reportlab.
Download it and install it as usual with python setup.py install
You will also need to install the following modules: xhtml2pdf, html5lib, pypdf with easy_install.
Here is an usage example:
First define this function:
import cStringIO as StringIO
from xhtml2pdf import pisa
from django.template.loader import get_template
from django.template import Context
from django.http import HttpResponse
from cgi import escape
def render_to_pdf(template_src, context_dict):
template = get_template(template_src)
context = Context(context_dict)
html = template.render(context)
result = StringIO.StringIO()
pdf = pisa.pisaDocument(StringIO.StringIO(html.encode("ISO-8859-1")), result)
if not pdf.err:
return HttpResponse(result.getvalue(), content_type='application/pdf')
return HttpResponse('We had some errors<pre>%s</pre>' % escape(html))
Then you can use it like this:
def myview(request):
#Retrieve data or whatever you need
return render_to_pdf(
'mytemplate.html',
{
'pagesize':'A4',
'mylist': results,
}
)
The template:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>My Title</title>
<style type="text/css">
@page {
size: {{ pagesize }};
margin: 1cm;
@frame footer {
-pdf-frame-content: footerContent;
bottom: 0cm;
margin-left: 9cm;
margin-right: 9cm;
height: 1cm;
}
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div>
{% for item in mylist %}
RENDER MY CONTENT
{% endfor %}
</div>
<div id="footerContent">
{%block page_foot%}
Page <pdf:pagenumber>
{%endblock%}
</div>
</body>
</html>
Hope it helps.