How do I create a simple pdf file in python?

Question

I'm looking for a way to output a VERY simple pdf file from Python. Basically it will consist of two columns of words, one in Russian (so utf-8 characters) and the other in English.

I've been googling for about an hour, and the packages I've found are either massive overkill (and still don't provide useful examples) such as ReportLab, or seem to assume that the only thing anyone would ever do with pdfs is concatenate several of them together (PyPdf, pdfrw).

Maybe I'm just missing something obvious, but all the ones I've seen seem to launch into some massive discussion about taking 17 pdf files and converting them into a 60 foot wide poster with 23 panes (slight exaggeration maybe), and leave me wondering how to get the "Hello World" program working. Any help would be appreciated.

I don't know of any tools, but you could approach your problem differently. Output what you want formatted to a text file, and then use a bash txt->pdf tool on that. — Clayton Stanley, Aug 05 '12 at 02:46
My coworker uses ReportLab for her PDF process in her app. Seems to work fine. — jdi, Aug 05 '12 at 02:53
possible duplicate of [How to create PDF files in Python](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2252726/how-to-create-pdf-files-in-python) — Mechanical snail, Aug 06 '12 at 05:16
Not a duplicate, the question specifically says pypdf isn't the answer. — phabtar, Aug 17 '13 at 05:41

Mohammad Alhashash · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-27T06:25:27.910

10

You may use wkhtmltopdf. It is a command line utility that uses Webkit to convert html to pdf.

You can generate your data as html and style it with css if you want, then, use wkhtmltopdf to generate the pdf file.

edited Sep 27 '14 at 06:25

answered Aug 05 '12 at 02:52

Mohammad Alhashash

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This works. I tried some of the other solutions and most of them had trouble with the utf-8 characters (although I'm sure there is some easy fix I don't know how to do that would solve it) but this one had no trouble. Thanks for your help! – Keilan Aug 05 '12 at 23:31

Mike Pennington · Answer 2 · 2012-08-05T12:06:49.123

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rst2pdf does exactly what you want; with restructured text input

Styles can be applied inline with native RST styling, and document-level properties (including fonts) are controlled with a style sheet.

edited Aug 05 '12 at 12:06

answered Aug 05 '12 at 07:37

Mike Pennington

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Unfortunately doesn't support python 3 for now. – Serge Sep 26 '14 at 10:02

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 05 '12 at 06:50

Try pod (python open document) is a library that allows to easily generate documents whose content is dynamic.

pod generates another ODF text document (ODT) that contains the desired result.pod can call OpenOffice in server mode to generate the result in PDF, DOC, RTF or TXT format.

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 05 '12 at 07:42

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A recipe to convert a text file to a PDF. A little long but pure Python and with no external dependencies.

answered Aug 05 '12 at 07:42

Noufal Ibrahim

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score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Aug 09 '12 at 15:43

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you could also use weasyprint it supports specific css paged media features

answered Aug 09 '12 at 15:43

yvess

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score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Jun 10 '17 at 16:53

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A simpler approach would be to use the csv package to write the two columns to a .csv file, then read it into a spreadsheet & print to pdf. Not 100% python but maybe 90% less work ...

answered Jun 10 '17 at 16:53

simonltwick

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How do I create a simple pdf file in python?

6 Answers6