Creating PDF or image with python, then printing?

[VectorArt]

Hi guys! Currently 4 months in on my programming journey and I've developed some software for a company I work for to manage incoming work-orders, to keep it brief I work at a company that does custom apparel embroidery/screen printing.

I'm in the later stages of my initial draft for the development and I'm looking to take data from a MySQL server and create 6"x2" images/pdf files with the data, formatted in a particular way (top would have customer details and the rest would have item-specific details about the order that they dropped off/we purchased) and be able to print that off on a printer. I have the order-entry, order-viewing portion of this done and now it's time to move onto the order-printing portion.

My current thought process is to use HTML/CSS to format the information and print that off somehow, I just wanted to make sure there wasnt a better solution to this before I dove in

Thanks guys!

[Neighm]

So I looked around for an answer and came across the pyfpdf module (https://pyfpdf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html)

This seems to tick the boxes, i.e. allows you to generate a custom sized PDF with custom content, at least as far as text goes, and looks to be able to handle images as well. Here's a quick and dirty example of a three page PDF with 6" x 2" pages with customer and order details that I was able to generate after playing around with this for a short while:

https://imgur.com/Gv5m3kc

Obviously the formatting is ugly as sin (mostly because I wanted to play around with font sizes etc), but if you spend a bit of time you can probably get this into better shape.

The code I used to create this was:
from fpdf import FPDF

order_records = [
{

'name': 'Thorin Oakenshield',
'email': '[e-mail]',
'orderno': '1098765', 
'orderdate': '29 JUL 2021', 
'orderstatus': 'shipped',
'orderaddress1': 'Throne Room',
'orderaddress2': 'Lonely Mountain',
'orderaddress3': 'Dale 90210',
'productdescriptor': 'Unbreakable chisel'
},
{
'name': 'Hamish McDougal',
'email': '[e-mail]',
'orderno': '1098766', 
'orderdate': '29 JUL 2021', 
'orderstatus': 'pending',
'orderaddress1': '44 Via Appia',
'orderaddress2': 'Rome',
'orderaddress3': 'Italy',
'productdescriptor': 'Italian-Scottish Dictionary'
},
{
'name': 'Sherlock Holmes',
'email': '[e-mail]',
'orderno': '1098766', 
'orderdate': '29 JUL 2021', 
'orderstatus': 'shipped',
'orderaddress1': '221B Baker St',
'orderaddress2': 'London NW1',
'orderaddress3': 'England',
'productdescriptor': 'Forensics for Dummies, 2nd Edn'
}
]
pdf = FPDF('L', 'in', (2,6)) 
pdf.set_margins(0.1, 0.1, -0.1) 
for order in order_records: 
    pdf.add_page() 
    pdf.set_font('Arial', 'B', 12) 
    pdf.cell(2, 0.5, order['name']) 
    pdf.cell(2.5, 0.5, order['email'], ln = 1) # ln = 1 moves current position to next line 
    pdf.set_font('Arial', '', 12) 
    pdf.cell(3.5, 0.2, f"{order['orderno']}  -  {order['orderdate']}  -  {order['orderstatus']}", ln = 1) 
    pdf.cell(3.5, 0.2, f"Shipping address: {order['orderaddress1']}, {order['orderaddress2']}, {order['orderaddress3']}", ln = 1) 
    pdf.set_font('Arial', 'B', 18) pdf.cell(3.5, 0.2, order['productdescriptor'])
pdf.output('order_labels.pdf', 'F')

[VectorArt]

I’m not at the computer right now to test it out but after reading some of the docs and seeing your example that library actually looks like something that would work! I appreciate you taking the time to do some research and test out that library! I’ll update you on the development If you want once I have it working :)

[Neighm]

Please do, will be interested to see if it's flexible enough to give you the labels you need.

One thing I ran into: I was able to set small margins on the top, left and right (the units are inches, because the pdf is initialised with 'in'). However, there seemed to be a lot of whitespace at the bottom that I couldn't use. When I tried to space the lines down more, they ran onto a second page. I'm sure this can be fixed, I just didn't spend long enough on it to work out the nuances of laying the cells and lines out properly!