Reference
Outlines/ Bookmarks
PDF supports outlines (Adobe calls them “bookmarks”). By default
xhtml2pdf defines the <h1> to <h6> tags to be shown in the
outline. But you can specify exactly for every tag which outline
behaviour it should have. Therefore you may want to use the following
vendor specific styles:
-pdf-outlineset it to “true” if the block element should appear in the outline
-pdf-outline-levelset the value starting with “0” for the level on which the outline should appear. Missing predecessors are inserted automatically with the same name as the current outline
-pdf-outline-openset to “true” if the outline should be shown uncollapsed
Example:
h1 {
-pdf-outline: true; -pdf-level: 0;
-pdf-open: false;
}
Table of Contents
It is possible to automatically generate a Table of Contents (TOC) with
xhtml2pdf. By default all headings from <h1> to <h6> will be
inserted into that TOC. But you may change that behaviour by setting the
CSS property -pdf-outline to true or false. To generate the
TOC simply insert <pdf:toc /> into your document. You then may
modify the look of it by defining styles for the pdf:toc tag and the
classes pdftoc.pdftoclevel0 to pdftoc.pdftoclevel5. Here is a
simple example for a nice looking CSS:
pdftoc {
color: #666;
}
pdftoc.pdftoclevel0 {
font-weight: bold;
margin-top: 0.5em;
}
pdftoc.pdftoclevel1 {
margin-left: 1em;
}
pdftoc.pdftoclevel2 {
margin-left: 2em;
font-style: italic;
}
Tables
Tables are supported but may behave a little different to the way you might expect them to do. These restriction are due to the underlying table mechanism of ReportLab.
The main restriction is that table cells that are longer than one page lead to an error
Tables can not float left or right and can not be inlined
Long cells
xhtml2pdf is not able to split table cells that are larger than the available
space. To work around it you may define what should happen in this case.
The -pdf-keep-in-frame-mode can be one of: “error”, “overflow”,
“shrink”, “truncate”, where “shrink” is the default value.
table { -pdf-keep-in-frame-mode: shrink;}
Cell widths
The table renderer is not able to adjust the width of the table automatically. Therefore you should explicitly set the width of the table and to the table rows or cells.
Headers
It is possible to repeat table rows if a page break occurs within a
table. The number of repeated rows is passed in the property
repeat. Example:
<table repeat="1">
<tr><th>Column 1</th><th>...</th></tr>
...
</table>
Borders
Borders are supported. Use corresponding CSS styles.
Images
Size
By default JPG images are supported. If the Python Imaging Library (PIL)
is installed the file types supported by it are available too. As
mapping pixels to points is not trivial the images may appear bigger in
the PDF as in the browser. To adjust this you may want to use the
zoom style. Here is a small example:
img { zoom: 80%; }
Position/ floating
Since Reportlab Toolkit does not yet support the use of images within paragraphs, images are always rendered in a separate paragraph. Therefore floating is not available yet.
Barcodes
You can embed barcodes automatically in a document. Various barcode
formats are supported through the type property. If you want the
original barcode text to be appeared on the document, simply add
humanreadable="1", otherwise simply omit this property. Some barcode
formats have a checksum as an option and it will be on by default, set
checksum="0" to override.
Alignment
is achieved through align property and available values are any of
"baseline", "top", "middle", "bottom" whereas default is
baseline. Finally, bar width and height can be controlled through
barwidth and barheight properties respectively.
<pdf:barcode value="BARCODE TEXT COMES HERE" type="code128" humanreadable="1" align="right" />