To render HTML to PDF in a Python Django site, we can create our own function.
For instance, we write
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))
to define the render_to_pdf function that uses the pisa.pisaDocument constructor to create the PDF from the html string.
We get html from render the template with the context to a HTML string.
Then we create a new HttpResponse that returns the PDF file as the response.
We set the content_type to application/pdf.
And we render result.getvalue to return the PDF.
Then in our view, we add
def myview(request):
return render_to_pdf(
'mytemplate.html',
{
'pagesize':'A4',
'mylist': results,
}
)
to render the mytemplate.html template into a PDF and return it as the response with render_to_pdf.
And then in mytemplate.html, we write
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<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>
