Question

Ok when im gonna make reports with Java I use iReport for JasperReports Template designs.

But with python the alternative is html2pdf – pisa.

It would be great to see an example of this.
Any hint would be appreciated.

Answer 1

The accounting software we are developing uses pisa to generate pdf reports. The process is like this:

1. Render a HTML template
2. Convert the rendered string to pdf. You can directly use the HttpResponse object you will return as output file, or a StringIO object to store the pdf and send its content via HttpResponse.
3. The mimetype of HttpResponse object should be set to application/pdf and use Content-Disposition header if you want to trigger download instead of displaying in the browser.

Pisa uses some unique CSS properties to specify pdf related formatting (page-size, page-break etc). Their docs provide sufficient examples on this.

Pisa’s rendering of HTML/CSS can be quite a bit different from what we usually see in browser. For example, setting border="1" on a <table> will give all cells of the table border, borders are always collapsed (border-collapse css attribute has no effect) etc.