Generate PDF using python and HTML

Dependencies:

sudo pip3 install pdfkit sudo apt-get install wkhtmltopdf

Pdfkit and wkhtmltopdf are the packages that you will be required before getting started.

PDF can be generated in 3 ways. One is using a website url, second one is using a html string and the last one is using a html file(optional css file can also be specified in all 3 ways).

In this article we will discuss the third way which is more advanced one and will be most useful for most of our requirements. Below is the program I am going to use to generate the PDF.

import pdfkit
import sys

inputfile = sys.argv[1]
outfile = args.argv[2]

options = {
      "enable-local-file-access": True,
      "enable /var/www/html/": True,
    'page-size': 'Letter',
    'margin-top': '0.75in',
    'margin-right': '0.75in',
    'margin-bottom': '0.75in',
    'margin-left': '0.75in',
    'encoding': "UTF-8",
    'custom-header': [
        ('Accept-Encoding', 'gzip')
    ],
    'cookie': [
        ('cookie-empty-value', '""'),
        ('cookie-name1', 'cookie-value1'),
        ('cookie-name2', 'cookie-value2'),
    ],
    'no-outline': None
}
# Single CSS file
css = 'bootstrap.css'

#pdfkit.from_url('https://google.com', 'out1.pdf')
pdfkit.from_file(inputfile, outfile, options=options, css=css)
#pdfkit.from_string('Hello!', 'out3.pdf')

In the code we can notice at the bottom that we can use a URL, local html file or a plain html string. Also a bootstrap.css file is being used for our styles. Common options that can be used to configure the PDF can also be seen in the above code. For full list of options that can be used read the documentaion here.

Now this code takes two arguments first one is input html file and the other being name of the output pdf that you want to generate into.

More documentaion regarding WKHTMLTOPDF can be read here.

Related Posts