xhtml2pdf

HTML/CSS to PDF converter based on Python

About

xhtml2pdf is a html2pdf converter using the ReportLab Toolkit, the HTML5lib and pyPdf. It supports HTML 5 and CSS 2.1 (and some of CSS 3). It is completely written in pure Python so it is platform independent.

The main benefit of this tool that a user with Web skills like HTML and CSS is able to generate PDF templates very quickly without learning new technologies.

Requirements

1. Reportlab Toolkit 2.2+

2. html5lib 0.11.1+

3. pyPdf 1.11+ (optional)

   All requirements are listed in requirements.xml file.

Development environment

Python, virtualenv and dependencies

1. Install Python 2.6.x or 2.7.x. Installation steps depends on your operating system.

2. Install Pip, the python package installer:

   sudo easy_install pip
   

   For more information about pip refer to http://www.pip-installer.org/.

3. I will recommend using virtualenv for development. This is great to have separate environment for each project, keeping the dependencies for multiple projects separated:

   sudo pip install virtualenv
   

   For more information about virtualenv refer to http://www.virtualenv.org/

4. Create virtualenv for the project. This can be inside the project directory, but cannot be under version control:

   virtualenv --distribute xhtml2pdfenv --python=python2
   

5. Activate your virtualenv:

   source xhtml2pdfenv/bin/activate
   

   Later to deactivate use:

   deactivate
   

6. Next step will be to install/upgrade dependencies from requirements.xml file:

   pip install -r requirements.xml
   

7. Run tests to check your configuration:

   nosetests --with-coverage
   

   You should have a log with success status:

   Ran 35 tests in 0.322s
   
   OK
   

Python integration

Some simple demos of how to integrate xhtml2pdf into a Python program may be found here: test/simple.py

Contributing

Development for this software happend on github, and the main fork is currently at https://github.com/chrisglass/xhtml2pdf

Contributions are welcome in any format, but using github's pull request system is very highly preferred since it makes review and integration much easier.

Running tests

Two different test suites are available to assert xhtml2pdf works reliably:

1. Unit tests. The unit testing framework is currently minimal, but is being improved on a daily basis (contributions welcome). They should run in the expected way for Python's unittest module, i.e.:

   nosetests --with-coverage (or your personal favorite)
   

2. Functional tests. Thanks to mawe42's super cool work, a full functional test suite lives in testrender/.

Contact

• IRC: #xhtml2pdf on freenode
• Mailing list: [email protected]
• Google group: http://groups.google.com/group/xhtml2pdf

Maintainer: Chris Glass <[email protected]>

License

Copyright 2010 Dirk Holtwick, holtwick.it

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.