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I am trying to generate a PDF using html+css using xhtml2pdf.pisa using Django. However, I'm running into all sorts of weird issues with the CSS.
Below is my code:
from django.template.loader import render_to_string
import cStringIO as StringIO
import xhtml2pdf.pisa as pisa
import cgi, os
def fetch_resources(uri, rel):
path = os.path.join(settings.STATIC_ROOT, uri.replace(settings.STATIC_URL, ""))
return path
def test_pdf(request):
html = render_to_string('pdf/quote_sheet.html', { 'pagesize':'A4', }, context_instance=RequestContext(request))
result = StringIO.StringIO()
pdf = pisa.pisaDocument(StringIO.StringIO(html.encode("UTF-8")), dest=result, link_callback=fetch_resources)
if not pdf.err:
return HttpResponse(result.getvalue(), mimetype='application/pdf')
return HttpResponse('Gremlins ate your pdf! %s' % cgi.escape(html))
And my template:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C/DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
{% load static from staticfiles %}
{% load i18n %}
<meta charset="utf-8"/>
<meta http-equiv="content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content='{% trans "g_locale2" %}'/>
<title>{% block title %}{% endblock %}</title>
<style type="text/css">
@page {
size: A4;
margin: 1cm;
@frame footer {
-pdf-frame-content: footerContent;
bottom: 0cm;
margin-left: 9cm;
margin-right: 9cm;
height: 1cm;
font-family: "Microsoft JhengHei";
}
}
@font-face {
font-family: "Microsoft JhengHei";
src:url('{% static "ttf/msjh.ttf" %}');
}
@font-face {
font-family: "Microsoft JhengHei";
src:url('{% static "ttf/msjhbd.ttf" %}');
}
@font-face {
font-family: "Helvetica";
src:url('{% static "ttf/Helvetica_Reg.ttf" %}');
}
table.styled-table tr th {
color: gray;
background-color: blue;
font-size: 14px;
font-family:"Microsoft JhengHei";
border: 1px solid black;
}
.biz_phone, .biz_fax {
display: inline-block;
width: 100px;
line-height: 32px;
}
.biz-info {
margin-bottom: 20px;
}
</style>
<link rel="stylesheet" href='{% static "css/pdf.css" %}'/>
</head>
<body>
<div id="main-content">
<div class="container">
<div class="biz-info">
<div class="biz_name">{{ proj.biz.name }}</div>
<div class="biz_address">{{ proj.biz.address }}</div>
<div class="biz_phone">{{ proj.biz.phone }}</div>
<div class="biz_fax">{{ proj.biz.fax }}</div>
</div>
<div class="table-div">
<table class="styled-table">
<tr class="row_header">
<th class="col_order">{% trans "g_item_num" %}</th>
<th class="col_name">{% trans "g_item_name" %}</th>
<th class="col_provider">{% trans "g_provider_name" %}</th>
<th class="col_budget_quantity">{% trans "g_quantity" %}</th>
<th class="col_price">{% trans "g_item_price" %}</th>
<th class="col_total_price">{% trans "g_item_total" %}</th>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
My code is pretty basic and nothing special, they are just pretty much copied verbatim from the web. I'm running into lots of weird issues:
I cannot observe a pattern from these symptoms other than just thinking the css parser and layout engine is just totally incomplete and non-functional. However I cannot find anyone online who has the same issues as me. Am I crazy? I'm not sure what is happening here... any help would be appreciated.
599
Under the covers, xhtml2pdf uses reportlab to actually create the PDF.
Doing some debugging - I followed the execution of parser.py in xhtml2pdf to see whether I could work out where the CSS was 'going missing' or being applied to the wrong elements.
I found that the CSS was successfully parsed and the translation into document fragments (here in the code) worked OK, with the correct CSS elements being applied to the correct elements.
I believe the problem comes with the reportlab pdf rendering engine. It is documented here. It does not have a 1:1 mapping between CSS and the directives you can pass into it.
I first became aware of it answering this question. For instance in the table rendering section of the reportlab documentation (open-source User Guide, chapter 7, page 76), it is obvious that there is no analogue for the border-style CSS attribute - so although in theory you can specify a border style and no error will be thrown, that value will be ignored.
While investigating CSS to pdf mapping, I found this software (Javascript) that also maps HTML/CSS to pdf. I tried that on the HTML from this question and the other one I linked to. This manages to render the pages correctly into the pdf document, so I believe this is not a fundamental limitation of the pdf document specification, but rather of the reportlab module.
It seems to me this is a problem for xhtml2pdf. It seems particularly bad for tables, but obviously affects other types of document too. Sorry not to resolve your problem, but I hope this goes some way towards explaining it.
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