How to run tests

This file describes how people should run the various test suites included with xhtml2pdf.

Unit tests

Running unit tests should be pretty intuitive to most python developers. xhtml2pdf uses the standard library’s unittest to write tests. As such, the following command should “just work”:

python -m unittest discover tests

A few extra bells and whistles are available. Specifically, a .coveragerc file is included with this project, therefore running coverage reports should give you immediately useful information:

pip install coverage
coverage run -m unittest discover tests
coverage run -a testrender/testrender.py
coverage report

The coverage percentage is currently pretty low - feel free to add extra tests!

Functional tests

xhtml2pdf ships with a functional tests suite. To see it in action, run the following commands from the xhtml2pdf directory:

python testrender/testrender.py
x-www-browser testrender/output/index.html

The suite renders a set of templates to pdf, then uses imagemagick (available on most unix-like systems) to convert the pdfs to png images, and finally creates a image of differences between the generated image and a reference image.

Image sets with a “difference score” of more than 0 are highlighted in red - this means the rendering library produced a bad result.

Font rendering is a very tricky business. As such, the functional suite often creates “ghost differences” for some font renderings (the images look perfect for a human eye, but the computer gives them a bad score anyway).

To solve theses, you should try regenerating reference images on your particular system, so that the exact mechanism used on your platform are used in both cases:

python testrender/testrender.py --create-reference local_reference
python testrender/testrender.py --ref-dir local_reference
x-www-browser testrender/output/index.html

You can now happily hack away at the library, without any ghost images.