There are many ways for generating PDF in python. In this post, I will be presenting PDF files generation with xhtml2pdf.

xhtml2pdf: xhtml2pdf is a HTML/CSS to PDF converter written in Python and therefore platform independent. xhtml2pdf supports for frameworks like Django and simple integration into Python programs. It is also usable as stand alone command line tool.

pisa: pisa is a html2pdf converter using the ReportLab Toolkit, the HTML5lib and pyPdf.

Install xhtml2pdf: You can install it with pip using the command - pip install xhtml2pdf

Next start writing a view that generates a PDF document from HTML content. Consider using the cStringIO library as a temporary holding place for your PDF file. The cStringIO library provides a file-like object interface that is particularly efficient.

from xhtml2pdf import pisa
import cStringIO as StringIO

def html_to_pdf(request):

    # Write your data here.
    html = """

HELLO.....!

"""     # open output file for writing     result = StringIO.StringIO()     # convert HTML to PDF with the HTML to convert and file handle to recieve result.     pdf = pisa.CreatePDF(src=html,dest=result)     if not pdf.err:         # Create the HttpResponse object with the appropriate PDF headers and          # get the value of the StringIO buffer and write it to the response.         return HttpResponse(result.getvalue(),content_type='application/pdf')     else:         return HttpResponse('Errors')

PDF generation directly using HTML:

from xhtml2pdf import pisa
 
 import cStringIO as StringIO
 
 from django.template.loader import get_template 

 from django.template import Context 

 def html_to_pdf_directly(request): 

     template = get_template("template_name.html") 

     context = Context({'pagesize':'A4'}) 

     html = template.render(context) 

     result = StringIO.StringIO() 

     pdf = pisa.pisaDocument(StringIO.StringIO(html), dest=result) 

     if not pdf.err: 

         return HttpResponse(result.getvalue(), content_type='application/pdf') 

     else: return HttpResponse('Errors')

The above code converts given HTML template to PDF File.