Outputting PDFs with Django

    The advantage of generating PDF files dynamically is that you can createcustomized PDFs for different purposes — say, for different users or differentpieces of content.

    For example, Django was used at kusports.com to generate customized,printer-friendly NCAA tournament brackets, as PDF files, for peopleparticipating in a March Madness contest.

    The ReportLab library is . A user guide (notcoincidentally, a PDF file) is also available for download.You can install ReportLab with :

    If that command doesn't raise any errors, the installation worked.

    The key to generating PDFs dynamically with Django is that the ReportLab APIacts on file-like objects, and Django's objects accept file-like objects.

    Here's a "Hello World" example:

    • The response will automatically set the MIME type _application/pdf_based on the filename extension. This tells browsers that the document is aPDF file, rather than an HTML file or a generic _application/octet-stream_binary content.
    • When as_attachment=True is passed to FileResponse, it sets theappropriate header and that tells Web browsers topop-up a dialog box prompting/confirming how to handle the document even if adefault is set on the machine. If the as_attachment parameter is omitted,browsers will handle the PDF using whatever program/plugin they've beenconfigured to use for PDFs.
    • Hooking into the ReportLab API is easy: The same buffer passed as the firstargument to canvas.Canvas can be fed to the class.
    • Note that all subsequent PDF-generation methods are called on the PDFobject (in this case, p) — not on buffer.

    注解

    ReportLab is not thread-safe. Some of our users have reported odd issueswith building PDF-generating Django views that are accessed by many peopleat the same time.

    Notice that there isn't a lot in these examples that's PDF-specific — just thebits using reportlab. You can use a similar technique to generate anyarbitrary format that you can find a Python library for. Also see for another example and some techniques you can usewhen generated text-based formats.

    Django Packages provides a comparison of packages that help generate PDF filesfrom Django.