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Asked: 2026-05-27T22:13:04+00:00

I have a Django app that stores client data. Currently, there are just over

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I have a Django app that stores client data. Currently, there are just over 1,000 clients in the database. Twice a year, I need to print a semi-customized letter for each client. Ideally, I want to be able to click a button/link and the entire batch is sent to the printer; I don’t want to have to click “print” for each letter since that would be absurdly time consuming.

I have thought of is using Celery to chug through the process of printing all the documents, but I don’t know how that would be accomplished. I would have to ‘build’ the document and send it to the printer without the user seeing this happen.

The other idea I had was to create a “web page” that contains all the letters on one page. Then the user can hit “Print” and the pages would come out of the printer as a collection of letters. Although, this seems sloppy.

Any ideas?

Thanks

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I would advise using wkhtmltopdf for this task. You can then create the required letters from one long html with pagebreaks or separately and print them as you regularly print PDF’s.

    http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/

    As wk stands for WebKit it will print exceptionally good quality PDF’s. It’s a commandline tool that you can just download and run. Small tutorial is here for you.

    http://shivul.posterous.com/django-create-dynamic-pdfs-using-wkhtmltopdf

    ReportLab is also a good option. But myself I don’t want to create raw pdf syntax and Pisa the html library for ReportLab is not really that good. wkhtmltopdf is much better and easier to use.

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