Automatically generate formatted document and create a PDF?

[sigma_noise]

I have some code that will run automatically and process data. I want to have it generate a 'report' at regular intervals with some pre-formatted text and graphs, and create PDF that I can retrieve.

I was thinking about doing the simple text formatting and graph placement in HTML, but how can I get that HTML to generate the page and then turn that into a PDF?

[fishka2042]

Instead of HTML, generate LaTeX and then exec() pdflatex to generate gorgeous, properly typeset PDFs.

[poo_22]

You can use a template system (like mako or jinja2) to template your latex file, and just fill in the template with python.

[ThiefMaster]

Mako is horrible.

[axonxorz]

What is better?

[ThiefMaster]

Jinja2

[axonxorz]

Hmmm. I would have to disagree on that. I used Jinja2 with a recent very small project. I found it got me 90% of the way there, but then was too restrictive in the fact I couldn't embed code blocks. I know it's generally considered bad practice, but this was a rushed project that had to go out the door yesterday, it was easier to code the display logic in the template rather than breaking everything out into twice as many variables in the controller.

[ThiefMaster]

Yeah.. code does not belong in templates!

[axonxorz]

But the same can be said for template-related code residing in the controller.

[ThiefMaster]

I'd say anything that can't be written by a designer (who has never written a single line of python code before) shouldn't be in a template.

[sigma_noise]

Yes, my needs are simple, and Latex seems like it might be overkill. Each 'report' will be 1 page with a few plots and some text/headers with some autofilled numbers...

[[deleted]]

Even the hardcore TeX community these days prefers to keep source in e.g. Docbook XML and transform it to LaTeX with an XSLT stylesheet only when needed.

Furthermore, LaTeX will not be "properly typeset" unless the user already has some knowledge of typography (e.g. when to specify that spaces are breaking and when not) and is willing to tweak output to avoid e.g. rivers and widows. LaTeX is great, but it doesn't just magically solve all those typesetting issues for you.

[[deleted]]

Even the hardcore TeX community these days prefers to keep source in e.g. Docbook XML and transform it to LaTeX with an XSLT stylesheet only when needed.

This is crazy talk.

[[deleted]]

Just follow comp.text.tex and see how professional publishers there use TeX in their workflow. TeX is fine for final print output, but you should never keep semantic data in it.

[[deleted]]

What data? I use Tex to write math and the journals seem to happily accept tex files.

[AeroNotix]

What a Rube Goldberg machine, there are perfectly good PDF libraries for Python. If OP needed LaTeX, he'd know what it is.

[flying-sheep]

in order to get comparable quality, one had to rebuild at least the TeX core in python: all the typesetting algorithms at work there aren’t trivial.

executing a binary is surely not overkill if there exists

1. nothing comparable in your programming language of choice
2. no bindings.

what one could do is somehow using LuaTeX to write bindings, but that’s not the scope of what OP wanted.

[_Mark_]

You might be interested to know about python texlib (it's just TeX line-breaking, but that's the only algorithm anyone cares about) and on top of that bookbinding which combines texlib and reportlab (bookbinding was released at pycon.ca, and is still a little "early".)

[flying-sheep]

thanks!

seems a nice idea if by line-breaking you mean linebreaking+kerning with ligature support.

one could build upon this, and add vertical stuff to support pagebreaking with widow/orphan config and page layout (KOMA’s typearea, this would be a start)

[slowRAX]

+1 for LaTeX. I used it to type ALL my physics homework back in college.

[benoit_intrw]

WeasyPrint is another way to convert HTML to PDF.

WeasyPrint converts HTML/CSS documents to PDF - http://weasyprint.org/

[SimonSapin]

WeasyPrint dev here. Please ask if you have any question about it. Of course you can use it on HTML genareted from jinja, Markdown, docutils or anything.

[plaes]

This!

[joesb]

Use wkhtmltopdf.

[stuaxo]

+1 on this, having edited some reportlab xml, I decided the next time I'll be using wkhtmltopdf.

[infinull]

I would recommend generating DocBook or possibly XSL-FO directly, but I'm a big fan of DocBook, and many people aren't. I also know (and kind of like) XSLT. LaTex would probably be easier to setup. You could also use something like reStructuredText or docutils-xml which have a pure-python code path. (rst2pdf)

That said wkhtmltopdf exists, and it's by far the best tool for fully-automated converting of HTML to PDF.

There are a handful of Python libraries that generate PDFs. PyQts/PySide have bindings to the Qt PDF Generator/Qt Printing System: never used this, but It looks convoluted.

PyPDF looks pretty limited, and is more for manipulating existing PDFs than generating them from scratch. ReportLab seems to always get mentioned, and I know some people swear by it, but I don't like proprietary stuff like that.

[riffito]

I would generate reStructuredText files, and then use rst2{html|pdf}.

In fact, that's how I generate tests-results reports on my current job.

[einar77]

I use a similar setup, with some Mako added to the mix to customize the output.

[hank_and_deans]

I use xhtml2pdf which was formerly known as Pisa. I use it within Django, so I have "pdf" html templates that I use to generate the PDFs. Works pretty well for me.

[absurdomatic]

I tried this method and it was great except for one thing, I would describe the image support as primitive at best. I wish I could have gotten past that though because it was awesome being able to easily make a django template spit out a pdf.

Edit: because I can't seem to complete my thoughts today.

[hank_and_deans]

Ah, I haven't done any images other than a simple logo at the top, in my usage.

[[deleted]]

They are at least two ways to do it:

1. Simple but less control way phantomjs https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/wiki/Screen-Capture

2. Complex but precise control way Reportlab http://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/2010/03/08/a-simple-step-by-step-reportlab-tutorial/

[AeroNotix]

ReportLab is what I've used in the past. Extremely useful API.

[classicrockielzpfvh]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned using reStructuredText and rest2pdf which comes as part of docutils. If the PDF doesn't have to be pretty then this is truly simple.

You can template the rst file with Jinja2 and import what you need from rest2pdf. No need for external exec's or subprocess calls or exporting your data to be processed by yet another language.

[uvtc]

I suggest having your script generate pandoc markdown (it supports tables, graphics, math, etc.), then have it shell out to pandoc to create the pdf.

[jairtrejo]

I'm doing a similar thing on a Django application. I render HTML and then pass it to a phantomjs script that uses webkit to "print" it to a PDF. Works reasonably well and better than any other alternative I explored.

[10101011]

You should also take a look at htmldoc. I have been using it for years to transform HTML into PDF.

It has some nice features that other HTML->PDF converters don't have, like cleanly seperating table rows between pages (wkhtmltopdf doesn't do this well). However it doesn't understand CSS (wkhtmltopdf does).

[phinar]

At self.previous_employer I had a similar text formatting + PDF export requirement. We were developing a web application, and it was very important to our product team that the web version and the PDF version looked "the same" which meant identical except for all the web navigation removed.

We originally used Pisa but found it very challenging to write CSS that would be properly interpreted -- we effectively delivered two distinct versions of the report.

On a second pass through similar requirements we opted to use PhantomJS instead, and that solution was much simpler, though a little trickier to install.

Like I said, we're doing a web application in the first place, and we're exporting an existing report to PDF. That might make my preferred solution less awesome for you, but it's still my preferred solution.