XHTML2PDF

The current release of xhtml2pdf is xhtml2pdf 0.2.4, which is the first stable version that has Python 3 support. As with all open-source software, its use in production depends on many factors, so be aware that you may find issues in some cases. Big thanks to everyone who has worked on this project so far and to those who help maintain it.

What else can you use instead?

You can try WeasyPrint. The codebase is pretty, it has different features, it does a lot of what xhtml2pdf does and it is easier to use in many circumstances.

Documentation?

The documentation of xhtml2pdf is available at Readthedocs. And we could use your help improving it! A good place to start is doc/usage.rst.

Call for testing

This project is heavily dependent on getting its test coverage up! Currently, Python 3 support is being worked on and many refactors and suggestions are potentially coming in. Furthermore, parts of the codebase could do well with cleanups and refactoring.

If you benefit from xhtml2pdf, perhaps look at the test coverage and identify parts that are yet untouched.

About

xhtml2pdf is a HTML to PDF converter using the ReportLab Toolkit, html5lib and pyPdf2. 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 is that a user with web skills like HTML and CSS is able to generate PDF templates very quickly without learning new technologies.

Installation

This is a typical Python library and can be installed using pip:

pip install xhtml2pdf

Requirements

Python 2.7+. Only Python 3.4+ is tested and guaranteed to work.

All additional requirements are listed in the requirements.txt file and are installed automatically using the pip install xhtml2pdf method.

Development environment

1. If you don't have it, install pip, the python package installer:

   sudo easy_install pip
   

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

2. We will recommend using virtualenv for development. It's great to have a 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/

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

   virtualenv --distribute xhtml2pdfenv --python=python2
   

4. Activate your virtualenv:

   source xhtml2pdfenv/bin/activate
   

   Later to deactivate use:

   deactivate
   

5. The next step will be to install/upgrade dependencies from the requirements.txt file:

   pip install -r requirements.txt
   

6. Run tests to check your configuration:

   nosetests --with-coverage
   

   You should have a log with the following success status:

   Ran 36 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

Running tests

Two different test suites are available to assert that 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 is available at testrender/.

Contact

This project is community-led! To strengthen it, please hang out on IRC #xhtml2pdf (Freenode) or join our maling list.

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

History

This are the major milestones and the maintainers of the project:

• 2000-2007, commercial project, spirito.de, written by Dirk Holtwich
• 2007-2010 Dirk Holtwich (project named "Pisa", project released as GPL)
• 2010-2012 Dirk Holtwick (project named "xhtml2pdf", changed license to Apache)
• 2012-2015 Chris Glass (@chrisglass)
• 2015-2016 Benjamin Bach (@benjaoming)
• 2016-2018 Sam Spencer (@LegoStormtroopr)
• 2018-Current Luis Zarate (@luisza)

For more history, see the CHANGELOG.txt file.

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.