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=(148, 139, 139), size_pt=32),
    "h2": FontFace(color=(148, 139, 139), 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_indents to FPDF.write_html():

from fpdf import FPDF

pdf = FPDF()
pdf.add_page()
pdf.write_html("""
  <dl>
      <dt>Term</dt>
      <dd>Definition</dd>
  </dl>
""", tag_indents={"dd": 5})
pdf.output("html_dd_indented.pdf")

Supported HTML features¶

<h1> to <h8>: headings (and align attribute)
<p>: paragraphs (and align, line-height attributes)
<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)
- <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)

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