PDF Generation with Weasyprint

Follow this steps for generation PDF files with weasyprint.

Dependencies

  • Update the file: requirements.txt.
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
  • Install packages: With a sudo session (or with any superuser privileges session) you must install your platform’s packages (Linux, Debian/Ubuntu).
$ sudo apt-get install python-dev python-pip python-lxml python-cffi libcairo2 libpango1.0-0 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 shared-mime-info
  • Install the next package: With a sudo session.
$ sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libffi-dev
  • You need to upgrade the next files. In organilab virtualenv:
source ~/entornos/organilab/bin/activate

pip install --upgrade setuptools pip
  • Finally, you going to install Weasyprint.
pip install WeasyPrint

Code

  • You need to define a HTML view (“example_pdf.html”). In this HTML view, you can define the top, the body and the bottom of the PDF file.
<html>
    <head>
        <style>
            @page {
                margin: 3cm 2cm; padding-left: 1.5cm;

                @top-left {
                    content: "Example Report";
                }
                @top-right {
                    content: "Date: {{ datetime }}";
                }
                @bottom-right {
                    content: "Page " counter(page) " of " counter(pages) ;
                }
                @bottom-left {
                    content:  "User: {{ request.user }}";
                    color: red;
                }
            }
            body {
                text-align: justify
            }
        </style>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h3>
            Hello, this is my report!!
        </h3>
    </body>
</html>
  • Define de PDF generator method.
def report_example(request):
    varModel = Model.objects.all()

    template = get_template('pdf/example_pdf.html')

    context = {
               'object_list': varModel,
               'datetime': timezone.now(),
               'request': request
               }

    html = template.render(Context(context)).encode("UTF-8")

    page = HTML(string=html, encoding='utf-8').write_pdf()

    response = HttpResponse(page, content_type='application/pdf')

    response[
              'Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename="report_example.pdf"'
    return response
  • Create the URL.
url(r"^report/example$", views.report_example, name="report_example"),