django - pisa : adding images to PDF output

Question

I'm using a standard example from the web (http://www.20seven.org/journal/2008/11/pdf-generation-with-pisa-in-django.html) to convert a django view / template into a PDF.

The mechanics work wonderfully. Thanks!

My question: Is there an "easy" way to include images (either from a url or a reference on the server) in the template so they will show on the PDF?

Thanks!

Jamie Duncan

Answer 1

I got the images working. the code is as follows:

from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.template.loader import render_to_string
from django.template import RequestContext
from django.conf import settings
import ho.pisa as pisa
import cStringIO as StringIO
import cgi
import os

def dm_monthly(request, year, month):
    html  = render_to_string('reports/dmmonthly.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))

def fetch_resources(uri, rel):
    path = os.path.join(settings.MEDIA_ROOT, uri.replace(settings.MEDIA_URL, ""))

    return path

This was taken liberally from http://groups.google.com/group/xhtml2pdf/browse_thread/thread/4cf4e5e0f4c99f55

Answer 2

You could always add the images afterwards with IText/ISharp.

Answer 3

I could not get images to appear despite trying every solution I could find on google. But this fudge worked for me as the command line version of pisa displays images ok:

    from tempfile import mkstemp

    # write html to a temporary file
    # can used NamedTemporaryFile if using python 2.6+
    fid, fname = mkstemp(dir='/tmp')
    f = open(fname, 'w+b')
    f.write(html)
    f.close()


    # now create pdf from the html 
    cmd = 'xhtml2pdf "%s"' % fname
    os.system(cmd)
    os.unlink(fname)

    # get the content of the pdf
    filename = fname+'.pdf'
    pdf = open(filename, 'r')
    content = pdf.read()

    pdf.close()
    os.unlink(pdf.name)

    # return content
    response = HttpResponse(content, mimetype='application/pdf')
    response['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename=draft.pdf'

This worked where the images had either a url or the full path name, eg.

<img src="/home/django/project/site_media/css/output/images/logo.jpg" />

<img src="http://www.mysite.com/css/output/images/logo.jpg" />