Basics of Using ReportLab with Python to Create PDF Files

During this tutorial, I will show you how to import data from a csv file and generate PDF files that contain both static data and images, as well as data read in from an external csv file. Questions? Leave a comment! www.elearninglive.com

[@benhmn]

Tutorial starts at 6:00 The real reportlab stuff starts and 16:30

[@spot1401]

nice video, exactly the pace I like. Not too fast, not too slow plus a little real world debugging. Will help me a lot with my project

[@tohu777]

Excellent! Got me started in no time - thanks!

[@darrylklassen1818]

Thanks Mark, good basic tutorial to get me started.

[@enyoc3d]

excellent tutorial; great style; thanks!

[@luxxart]

Fantastic tutorial, thanks!

[@Unicent80]

Great Job. Very Helpful.

[@amerispunk]

Thanks, I also really appreciate this video tutorial. I really expected many more available (youtube) resources on reportlab but this serves as a nice intro.

[@LearnAtMyExpense]

Thanks for the kind words, Mark. I too was very surprised when I looked and did not find any reportlab videos.

[@travlling_chain]

Great one. Thanks man.

[@Luiz_Gonzagaa]

nice tutorial :D thanks !

[@pavansaik6939]

can i create a table and insert some text and images into it using reportlab?

[@alfgit8784]

@ 20:40 FYI, it's not pronounced 'leeding', it's pronounced 'ledding' as in the heavy metal. It's an old typesetting term which originally referred to strips of lead placed between the lines to control line spacing.

[@mrtrader3661]

is there a way after saving the file to get dialog to save as for user to use?

[@saidalbahri4430]

Great tutorial.

[@manivarmaindukuri7801]

Can we copy content of one PDF into a newly created PDF using Reportlab ? Both PDFs depict text in same way

[@manivarmaindukuri7801]

Sir , can I extract only highlighted text from a PDF using reportlab ? please make a tutorial on this . Thank you

[@khairulizhar]

Good explanation

[@skywaycare]

Good tutorial video

[@rynodupreez6696]

Hi mark is there a way in report lab to display all the data from you csv file exp. 1 | 2 | 3 and 2 |3 |1 under one verible exp number =row[?]. I only get the second set not both of them. Thanks again for your great KZbin vedio

[@stunamvap8617]

tks a lot... have good day

[@samueljunio]

Thanks man.

[@user-mv5en1pb9d]

well done thank you

[@skasifali2202]

Nice video sir. How can I print the whole table using report lab in pyqt5??

[@chriskeo392]

Hey mark, Can you do more report lab videos? U mentioned you've made a more complex one?

[@TheSergioPestana]

Hey Mark! Awesome tutorial, can u give us the code that u created?

[@oscarfloresfonseca1062]

Thank you for this tutorial, I want to know if there a way to change the output directory of the PDF file instead of path directory?

[@LearnAtMyExpense]

Oscar, It's been a while since I recorded this or worked with ReportLab but a quick look at the code I wrote in the video and I think that the likely way to do it is to simply modify the 'pdf_file_name' variable like this: target_directory = '../MY_DIRECTORY/' pdf_file_name = target_directory + 'my_filename' + '.pdf' Hopefully that works and makes sense. Give it a try and leave a comment. mark

[@Saywhatohno]

Can this script be run in Excel? this way anyone can run not just the person who knows python.

[@AsifIqbal-sj1ct]

some errors i was facing like i wrote "rb" as it was not clear then googled and found 'rb'. similarly small issues. working ok now. Thanks .Love from Pakistan :)

[@muhsinaltintop]

Hello, first thank you for this great tutorial. You have a place in The Heaven. I encountered with a problem: Env: Python 3.8.1 (tags/v3.8.1:1b293b6, Dec 18 2019, 22:39:24) [MSC v.1916 32 bit (Intel)] on win32 Code Editor: PyCharm 2020.2 (C.E.) This is the eror : line 12, in import_data for row in customer_data: _csv.Error: iterator should return strings, not bytes (did you open the file in text mode?) Thanks in advance...

[@dbwstein]

great video! Watch the whole thing when he fixes the typos in the program. otherwise, you're gonna be confused.

[@Jacob930321]

What software do you use to record the screencast?

[@LearnAtMyExpense]

It's been so long I can't remember, but probably the one I still use today on linux - Kazam. It's been consistently great for me. Most people like SimpleScreenRecorder but I'm a Kazam fan myself.

[@AutomateTon]

I have a silly doubt, but what if we have to draw several strings, but I dont know what their length might be, is it possible to draw them one after another without specifying x,y coordinates. or one string position relative to other.

[@LearnAtMyExpense]

+Nishant Grover Not quite sure what you're asking. You can't draw lines without stating where the lines should be drawn : ) Of course you could store the coordinates in variables and then use those when you're ready?

[@AutomateTon]

+mark2741 Found the answer in userguide of Report lab, we can use textobjects and textobject.textLine , textobject.textLines to write strings one after another without specifying x,y co-ordinates.

[@jolettin6408]

Hi, thanks for the great tutorial. I wonder if you can point me in the right direction. Im using what learnt in the tutorial to try and create multiple order pdfs, grouped by order number. It works great until i want to add order lines /a table into the canvas. Can you suggest some key terms i could search for on how to add a table/frame to the canvas, based on the group. do i need to define my data twice? one with the group and one with out? many thanks

[@LearnAtMyExpense]

It's been quite some time (years) since I've done anything with ReportLab so I probably can't help, but did you see this: stackoverflow.com/questions/53529173/how-to-draw-a-table-on-a-canvas-in-python-using-report-lab My initial thought was to see if you could render the table (and contents) dynamically via html tags into ReportLab. I am unsure whether that is possible but that might be an option to research.

[@jolettin6408]

@@LearnAtMyExpense hi. Thanks for the suggested link, really appreciate the feed back. I know how old the video is, so I was not expecting a response so soon. But you have really helped me out by pointing me in a good direction. Thanks again,

[@UmarYusuf]

hi, how do I make my generated pdf file auto open immediately after generating it?

[@LearnAtMyExpense]

Try the suggestions here: stackoverflow.com/questions/19453338/opening-pdf-file

[@UmarYusuf]

Thanks it worked!

[@rynodp1]

Thank for this Tutorial this helps allot and answers allot off questions. How would you call a sqlite query to populate the PDF ?.

[@LearnAtMyExpense]

Hi ryno. I don't know - never tried it with sqlite, but I'm certain it is just a matter of usual querying and just assigning the values/records from the sqlite db to variables and then just pass those variables to reportlab. In the video I am doing this by reading in the csv file and then parsing and assigning csv values to variables. You should be able to find how to do this with sqlite. Good luck!

[@riviera443]

Gr8

[@justinp9373]

Great tutorial Thank you. I encountered an issue with an error and it drove me mad why it kept saying no drawCentredString After stomping around angry I noticed I was spelling drawCenteredString ugh

[@LearnAtMyExpense]

Justin P Glad you liked the tutorial!

[@mikeymop]

Btw .72 of an inch is pixels to inch at 300PPI

[@paijocuwakep]

how about create miltple pages with reportlab?

[@LearnAtMyExpense]

+Anggun Pribadi Easily done with reportlab. I haven't looked at reportlab in quite some time but I am sure it is just another function call via the API. If you can complete this tutorial and understand the basics then adding a new page should be no problem.

[@RagHelen]

I had to rewrite as good as every line before I ran into unsolvable problems inside pdfmetrics.py in the reportlab module. But this way is not the right way in the 21st century anyway. There is HTML, ODT and CSS for the layout, done by pros, and then it is exported to the archaic PDF. The clients of reportlab seem to be STEM scientists prone to bad layouting in PDf, but they would be better of with using HTML.

[@jacobtam4279]

Great Video but why do you import Image from reportlab.lib.platypus when I cant see where you use it? are you using it somewhere and I missed it?

[@LearnAtMyExpense]

It's beena long time since this was recorded (7 years!) so it's possible that the Image library is no longer required. At the time I believe it was required by the Reportlab library. To test/verify that, remove that line from the script and see if it runs for you. If it does then it's not needed.

[@TicatWolves]

Nice tutorial 🙂 Hello sir, I am trying to convert text file text to PDF using reportlab. I'm using this textfile = open("myfile.rtf",encoding="utf-8") text = textfile.read() from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas c = canvas.Canvas("output.pdf") t = c.beginText() t.setFont('Times-Roman', 10) t.setCharSpace(3) t.setTextOrigin(20, 800) t.textLines(text) c.drawText(t) c.showPage() c.save() But the output is weird 😩 Is there a way to convert rtf file or html to pdf. and also dynamically create new page if necessary. also break line automatically when needed. I can also try to convert rft file to html then convert it to pdf.

[@LearnAtMyExpense]

Try reading over the ReportLab docs - I do believe you can pass html to use to format a report, but it's been a long time since I used it.

[@TicatWolves]

mark2741 thanks I got the way to do so

[@manivarmaindukuri7801]

Sir , Please , can you make a video to password protect a PDF file using reportlab in Python ? It will be very useful to me. Thank you

[@LearnAtMyExpense]

Have you seen this? gauravvichare.com/how-to-password-protect-pdf-file-using-python/ Looks like PyPDF library will work for what you're trying to do.

[@manivarmaindukuri7801]

Sir , that code is not working for every PDF. I am getting an error. There is a problem in PDF . Please you try his code and analyse Sir Please Sir help me This is the error: Traceback (most recent call last): File "pwd.py", line 13, in output.write(outputstream) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyPDF2/pdf.py", line 482, in write self._sweepIndirectReferences(externalReferenceMap, self._root) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyPDF2/pdf.py", line 571, in _sweepIndirectReferences self._sweepIndirectReferences(externMap, realdata) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyPDF2/pdf.py", line 547, in _sweepIndirectReferences value = self._sweepIndirectReferences(externMap, value) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyPDF2/pdf.py", line 571, in _sweepIndirectReferences self._sweepIndirectReferences(externMap, realdata) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyPDF2/pdf.py", line 547, in _sweepIndirectReferences value = self._sweepIndirectReferences(externMap, value) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyPDF2/pdf.py", line 556, in _sweepIndirectReferences value = self._sweepIndirectReferences(externMap, data[i]) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyPDF2/pdf.py", line 571, in _sweepIndirectReferences self._sweepIndirectReferences(externMap, realdata) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyPDF2/pdf.py", line 547, in _sweepIndirectReferences value = self._sweepIndirectReferences(externMap, value) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyPDF2/pdf.py", line 586, in _sweepIndirectReferences newobj = self._sweepIndirectReferences(externMap, newobj) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyPDF2/pdf.py", line 547, in _sweepIndirectReferences value = self._sweepIndirectReferences(externMap, value) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyPDF2/pdf.py", line 547, in _sweepIndirectReferences value = self._sweepIndirectReferences(externMap, value) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyPDF2/pdf.py", line 586, in _sweepIndirectReferences newobj = self._sweepIndirectReferences(externMap, newobj) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyPDF2/pdf.py", line 547, in _sweepIndirectReferences value = self._sweepIndirectReferences(externMap, value) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyPDF2/pdf.py", line 556, in _sweepIndirectReferences value = self._sweepIndirectReferences(externMap, data[i]) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyPDF2/pdf.py", line 586, in _sweepIndirectReferences newobj = self._sweepIndirectReferences(externMap, newobj) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyPDF2/pdf.py", line 547, in _sweepIndirectReferences value = self._sweepIndirectReferences(externMap, value) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyPDF2/pdf.py", line 586, in _sweepIndirectReferences newobj = self._sweepIndirectReferences(externMap, newobj) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyPDF2/pdf.py", line 547, in _sweepIndirectReferences value = self._sweepIndirectReferences(externMap, value) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyPDF2/pdf.py", line 577, in _sweepIndirectReferences newobj = data.pdf.getObject(data) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyPDF2/pdf.py", line 1611, in getObject retval = readObject(self.stream, self) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyPDF2/generic.py", line 66, in readObject return DictionaryObject.readFromStream(stream, pdf) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyPDF2/generic.py", line 636, in readFromStream raise utils.PdfReadError("Unable to find 'endstream' marker after stream at byte %s." % utils.hexStr(stream.tell())) PyPDF2.utils.PdfReadError: Unable to find 'endstream' marker after stream at byte 0xa781.

[@LearnAtMyExpense]

@@manivarmaindukuri7801 what is the file size of the PDF? Seems lots of people have problems when the file size is > 10MB. Try this: stackoverflow.com/questions/28679706/how-to-edit-a-pdf-file-replacing-its-data

[@manivarmaindukuri7801]

@@LearnAtMyExpense It's not even greater than 1 MB Sir. Some problem with Internal code of PyPDF and input PDF. If that problem isn't sorted out ,I have to work with Reportlab library to password protect a PDF file. In ReportLab , we have pdfencrypt module to assign password to a PDF file . Is this possible using Reportlab ,Sir ? Please respond Sir

[@AChadi-ug9pg]

plz sir , can i use it inside tkinter GUI ???

[@LearnAtMyExpense]

I don't see why you couldn't.

[@AChadi-ug9pg]

@@LearnAtMyExpense would show an example of opening a pdf inside a tkinter widget

[@LearnAtMyExpense]

@@AChadi-ug9pg I'm not very familiar with Tkinter but here you go: stackoverflow.com/questions/26653929/pdf-viewer-for-python-tkinter

[@AChadi-ug9pg]

@@LearnAtMyExpense okey thank you sir, i will try as soon as possible and let you know weather it's working or not

[@AsifIqbal-sj1ct]

please provide code link below.not clear in video. thanks

[@LearnAtMyExpense]

It's a tutorial. It's not meant to be me doing your coding for you - it's meant for you to follow along and learn so that you can do it yourself.

[@AsifIqbal-sj1ct]

yes i know sir. i am not a University student who has this task as home work. i am doing this for self learning . But problem is i am completely new to python and ReportLab library. i can't follow along as it's size is very small.Thanks :)

[@AsifIqbal-sj1ct]

please mail me source code py file or source code txt file at [e-mail] . i can learn python only by making some projects like this.

[@chrishubley7849]

This is what leading is: kzbin.info/www/bejne/l6Dbp2WifrFma9E