Quickstart

Install

Prerequisites: Python v3.10 or newer

This is a typical Python library and is installed using pip

pip install xhtml2pdf

Use

Python

For basic PDF rendering, you’ll mostly need to use the xhtml2pdf.pisa.CreatePDF() function.

from xhtml2pdf import pisa

# enable logging
pisa.showLogging()

html_source = "<html><body><p>To PDF or not to PDF</p></body></html>"

with open("test.pdf", "w+b") as result_file:
    # convert HTML to PDF
    pisa_status = pisa.CreatePDF(
        html_source,       # page data
        dest=result_file,  # destination file
    )

    # Check for errors
    if pisa_status.err:
        print("An error occurred!")

A conversion that fails raises. Pass raise_exception=False to be handed the status object with err set instead, or show_error_as_pdf=True to render a PDF listing the errors and the warnings.

You can generate files in-memory by writing to io.BytesIO or io.StringIO objects:

import io

from xhtml2pdf import pisa

output = io.BytesIO()

pisa.CreatePDF(
    "<html><body><p>To PDF or not to PDF</p></body></html>",  # page data
    dest=output,                                              # destination "file"
)

# You can get the PDF file bytes with `.getbuffer()`
print(len(output.getbuffer()))

Command-line

You can convert HTML files to PDF documents from the command line:

xhtml2pdf source.html output.pdf

The same tool is installed as pisa, and the package can be run as a module:

python -m xhtml2pdf source.html output.pdf

Demonstration

The smallest document that produces a PDF.

quickstart.html

<html>
<head><title>Quickstart</title></head>
<body>
    <p>To PDF or not to PDF</p>
</body>
</html>