HTML¶

fpdf2 supports basic rendering from HTML.

This is implemented by using html.parser.HTMLParser from the Python standard library. The whole HTML 5 specification is not supported, and neither is CSS, but bug reports & contributions are very welcome to improve this. cf. Supported HTML features below for details on its current limitations.

For a more robust & feature-full HTML-to-PDF converter in Python, you may want to check Reportlab (or xhtml2pdf based on it), WeasyPrint or borb.

write_html usage example¶

HTML rendering requires the use of FPDF.write_html():

from fpdf import FPDF

pdf = FPDF()
pdf.add_page()
pdf.write_html("""
  <dl>
      <dt>Description title</dt>
      <dd>Description Detail</dd>
  </dl>
  <h1>Big title</h1>
  <section>
    <h2>Section title</h2>
    <p><b>Hello</b> world. <u>I am</u> <i>tired</i>.</p>
    <p><a href="https://github.com/py-pdf/fpdf2">py-pdf/fpdf2 GitHub repo</a></p>
    <p align="right">right aligned text</p>
    <p>i am a paragraph <br>in two parts.</p>
    <font color="#00ff00"><p>hello in green</p></font>
    <font size="7"><p>hello small</p></font>
    <font face="helvetica"><p>hello helvetica</p></font>
    <font face="times"><p>hello times</p></font>
  </section>
  <section>
    <h2>Other section title</h2>
    <ul type="circle">
      <li>unordered</li>
      <li>list</li>
      <li>items</li>
    </ul>
    <ol start="3" type="i">
      <li>ordered</li>
      <li>list</li>
      <li>items</li>
    </ol>
    <br>
    <br>
    <pre>i am preformatted text.</pre>
    <br>
    <blockquote>hello blockquote</blockquote>
    <table width="50%">
      <thead>
        <tr>
          <th width="30%">ID</th>
          <th width="70%">Name</th>
        </tr>
      </thead>
      <tbody>
        <tr>
          <td>1</td>
          <td>Alice</td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
          <td>2</td>
          <td>Bob</td>
        </tr>
      </tbody>
    </table>
  </section>
""")
pdf.output("html.pdf")

Styling HTML tags globally¶

New in 2.7.9

The style of several HTML tags (<a>, <blockquote>, <code>, <pre>, <h1>, <h2>, <h3>...) can be set globally, for the whole HTML document, by passing tag_styles to FPDF.write_html():

from fpdf import FPDF, FontFace

pdf = FPDF()
pdf.add_page()
pdf.write_html("""
  <h1>Big title</h1>
  <section>
    <h2>Section title</h2>
    <p>Hello world!</p>
  </section>
""", tag_styles={
    "h1": FontFace(color="#948b8b", size_pt=32),
    "h2": FontFace(color="#948b8b", size_pt=24),
})
pdf.output("html_styled.pdf")

Similarly, the indentation of several HTML tags (<blockquote>, <dd>, <li>) can be set globally, for the whole HTML document, by passing tag_styles to FPDF.write_html():

from fpdf import FPDF, TextStyle

pdf = FPDF()
pdf.add_page()
pdf.write_html("""
  <dl>
      <dt>Term</dt>
      <dd>Definition</dd>
  </dl>
  <blockquote>
  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed non risus.
  Suspendisse lectus tortor, dignissim sit amet, adipiscing nec, ultricies sed, dolor.
  Cras elementum ultrices diam.
  </blockquote>
""", tag_styles={
    "dd": TextStyle(l_margin=5),
    "blockquote": TextStyle(color="#ccc", font_style="I",
                            t_margin=5, b_margin=5, l_margin=10),
  })
pdf.output("html_dd_indented.pdf")

⚠️ Note that this styling is currently only supported for a subset of all HTML tags, and that some FontFace or TextStyle properties may not be honored. However, Pull Request are welcome to implement missing features!

Default font¶

New in 2.8.0

The default font used by FPDF.write_html() is Times.

You can change this default font by passing font_family to this method:

from fpdf import FPDF

pdf = FPDF()
pdf.add_page()
pdf.write_html("""
  <h1>Big title</h1>
  <section>
    <h2>Section title</h2>
    <p>Hello world!</p>
  </section>
""", font_family="Helvetica")
pdf.output("html_helvetica.pdf")

Supported HTML features¶

<h1> to <h6>: headings (and align attribute)
<p>: paragraphs (and align, line-height attributes)
<br> & <hr> tags
<b>, <i>, <u>: bold, italic, underline
<font>: (and face, size, color attributes)
<center> for aligning
<a>: links (and href attribute) to a file, URL, or page number.
<pre> & <code> tags
<img>: images (and src, width, height attributes)
<ol>, <ul>, <li>: ordered, unordered and list items (can be nested)
<dl>, <dt>, <dd>: description list, title, details (can be nested)
<sup>, <sub>: superscript and subscript text
<table>: (with align, border, width, cellpadding, cellspacing attributes) those tags are rendered using fpdf2 Tables layout and the following sub-tags are supported:
- <thead>: optional tag, wraps the table header row
- <tfoot>: optional tag, wraps the table footer row
- <tbody>: optional tag, wraps the table rows with actual content
- <tr>: rows (with align, bgcolor attributes)
- <th>: heading cells (with align, bgcolor, width attributes)
- <td>: cells (with align, bgcolor, width, rowspan, colspan attributes)

Page breaks¶

New in 2.8.0

Page breaks can be triggered explicitly using the break-before or break-after CSS properties. For exemple you can use:

<br style="break-after: page">

or:

<p style="break-before: page">
Top of a new page.
</p>

Known limitations¶

fpdf2 HTML renderer does not support some configurations of nested tags. For example:

<table> cells can contain <td><b><em>nested tags forming a single text block</em></b></td>, but not <td><b>arbitrarily</b> nested <em>tags</em></td> - cf. issue #845

You can also check the currently open GitHub issues with the tag html: label:html is:open

Using Markdown¶

Check Combine with mistletoe to use Markdown