Reference
Supported @page properties and values
Valid @page properties:
background-image
size
margin, margin-bottom, margin-left, margin-right, margin-top
Valid size syntax and values:
Syntax: @page { size: <type> <orientation>; }
Where <type> is one of:
a0 .. a6
b0 .. b6
elevenseventeen
legal
letter
And <orientation> is one of:
landscape
portrait
Defaults to:
size: a4 portrait;
Supported @frame properties:
Valid @frame properties.
bottom, top, height
left, right, width
margin, margin-bottom, margin-left, margin-right, margin-top
To avoid unexpected results, please only specify two out of three bottom/top/height properties, and two out of three left/right/width properties per @frame object.
Supported CSS properties
xhtml2pdf supports the following standard CSS properties
background-color
border-bottom-color, border-bottom-style, border-bottom-width
border-left-color, border-left-style, border-left-width
border-right-color, border-right-style, border-right-width
border-top-color, border-top-style, border-top-width
colordisplay
font-family, font-size, font-style, font-weight
height
line-height, list-style-type
margin-bottom, margin-left, margin-right, margin-top
padding-bottom, padding-left, padding-right, padding-top
page-break-after, page-break-before
size
text-align, text-decoration, text-indent
vertical-align
white-space
width
zoom
xhtml2pdf adds the following vendor-specific properties:
-pdf-frame-border
-pdf-frame-break
-pdf-frame-content
-pdf-keep-with-next
-pdf-next-page
-pdf-outline
-pdf-outline-level
-pdf-outline-open
-pdf-page-break
Create PDF
The main function of xhtml2pdf is called CreatePDF(). It offers the following arguments in this order:
src: The source to be parsed. This can be a file handle or a
String
- or even better - aUnicode
object.dest: The destination for the resulting PDF. This has to be a file object wich will not be closed by
CreatePDF
. (XXX allow file name?)path: The original file path or URL. This is needed to calculate relative paths of images and style sheets. (XXX calculate automatically from src?)
link_callback: Handler for special file paths (see below).
show_error_as_pdf: Boolean that indicates that the errors will be dumped into a PDF. This is usefull if that is the only way to show the errors like in simple web applications.
default_css: Here you can pass a default CSS definition in as a
String
. If set toNone
the predefined CSS of xhtml2pdf is used.xhtml: Boolean to force parsing the source as XHTML. By default the HTML5 parser tries to guess this.** DEPRECATED **
encoding: The encoding name of the source. By default this is guessed by the HTML5 parser. But HTML with no meta information this may not work an then this argument is helpfull.
encrypt: Encrypt parameters to build password protection and encryption.
signature: Dictionary that pass parameters to signature engine using
pkcs12
,pkcs11
,simple
signatures key managers and sign Pades withb
orltv
signs modes.
Link callback
Images, backgrounds and stylesheets are loaded form an HTML document.
Normally xhtml2pdf
expects these files to be found on the local drive.
They may also be referenced relative to the original document. But the
programmer might want to load form different kind of sources like the
Internet via HTTP requests or from a database or anything else.
Therefore you may define a link_callback
that handles these requests.
XXX
Web applications
XXX
Defaults
The name of the first layout template is
body
, but you better leave the name empty for defining the default template (XXX May be changed in the future!)
Fonts
By default there is just a certain set of fonts available for PDF. Here
is the complete list - and their repective alias names - xhtml2pdf
knows by default (the names are not case sensitive):
Times-Roman: Times New Roman, Times, Georgia, serif
Helvetica: Arial, Verdana, Geneva, sansserif, sans
Courier: Courier New, monospace, monospaced, mono
ZapfDingbats
Symbol
Asian Fonts Support
Now some Asian fonts are available by default for PDF. The names are not case sensitive.
Simplified Chinese:
STSong-Light
Traditional Chinese:
MSung-Light
Japanese:
HeiseiMin-W3
HeiseiKakuGo-W5
Korean:
HYSMyeongJo-Medium
HYGothic-Medium
Just use them in the font-family
property in your CSS definition.
<style>
p { font-family: STSong-Light }
</style>
If you need another font, you may have a look at the “Using Custom Fonts” section.
Arabic / Hebrew / Persian etc. Fonts Support
If you are using a language with right-to-left writing you need to specify the language name in the <pdf:language name=""/>
custom tag. This is necessary to ensure the correct direction (right to left).
The following attributes for right-to-left languages are supported and tested:
name="arabic"
name="hebrew"
name="persian"
name="urdu"
name="pashto"
name="sindhi"
Usage example:
<pdf:language name="arabic"/>
<p>Some Arabic text here</p>
<p>Some English text here</p>
The Arabic letters will render from right to left, while all other Latin letters will keep their left-to-right direction.
Warning
Right now it seems like right-to-left support isn’t working while using a default font-family like p { font-family: Times-Roman }
. We’re working on fixing this. However, it works by using the @font-face
tag in the CSS definition and defining a custom font. Therefore you need the specified font file. “MarkaziText” for example seems to work. It can be downloaded for free here: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Markazi+Text Other fonts might work as well but haven’t been tested.
<style>
@font-face {font-family: MyRightToLeftFont; src: url('path\to\the\font\file\MarkaziText-Regular.ttf')}
p { font-family: MyRightToLeftFont }
</style>
Using Custom Fonts
You may also embed a new font by using the @font-face
keyword in CSS like this:
@font-face {
font-family: Example, "Example Font";
src: url('example.ttf');
}
The font-family
property defines the names under which the embedded
font will be known. src
defines the place of the fonts source file.
This can be a TrueType font or a Postscript font. The file name of the
first has to end with .ttf
the latter with one of .pfb
or
.afm
. For Postscript fonts pass just one filename like
<name>
.afm
or <name>
.pfb
, the missing one will be
calculated automatically.
To define other shapes you can do the following:
/* Normal */
@font-face {
font-family: DejaMono;
src: url('font/DejaVuSansMono.ttf');
}
/* Bold */
@font-face {
font-family: DejaMono;
src: url('font/DejaVuSansMono-Bold.ttf');
font-weight: bold;
}
/* Italic */
@font-face {
font-family: DejaMono;
src: url('font/DejaVuSansMono-Oblique.ttf');
font-style: italic;
}
/* Bold and italic */
@font-face {
font-family: DejaMono;
src: url('font/DejaVuSansMono-BoldOblique.ttf');
font-weight: bold;
font-style: italic;
}
Using TFF files with the same face-name
In specific situations we have to use .ttf files with the same face name,
but working with these kind of files makes us deal with some issues. To
avoid it you have to add #
at the beginning of the font-family name
.
Please check the following example:
/* put in quotes and add # at the beginning */
@font-face {
font-family: '#MY';
src: url('font/Microsoft YaHei.ttf')
}
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-outline
set it to “true” if the block element should appear in the outline
-pdf-outline-level
set 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-open
set 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 seperate 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" />
Tag-Definitions
pdf:barcode
Creates a barcode.
pdf:pagenumber
Prints current page number. The argument “example” defines the space the page number will require e.g. “00”.
pdf:pagecount
Prints total page count.
pdf:nexttemplate
Defines the template to be used on the next page. The name of the
template is passed via the name
property and refers to a
@page templateName
style definition:
<pdf:nexttemplate name="templateName">
pdf:nextpage
Create a new page after this position.
pdf:nextframe
Jump to next unused frame on the same page or to the first on a new page. You may not jump to a named frame.
pdf:spacer
Creates an object of a specific size.
pdf:toc
Creates a Table of Contents.
pdf:language
Used for languages with right-to-left writing like Arabic, Hebrew, Persion etc. Right-to-left writing can be defined by passing the name via the name=""
property.
<pdf:language name="arabic"/>