Ask LibreOffice to export the document in PDF format.Zip the modified files into a new LibreOffice.Manipulate the document’s XML using standard Python libraries.(Note: I mean “template” in the general sense of a form or skeleton, not a LibreOffice. Create a LibreOffice document that will serve as a template for the documents you want to create.Don’t worry if you don’t understand all the steps they’re fleshed out below. For now, I want to stop talking mysteriously about “the technique” and actually describe it. As I said above, I’ll tell you why I think it’s good in another blog post. Computers are great for this sort of thing, and this technique is particularly good at it. The first page after that will be a summary of the customer’s accounts, and then subsequent pages contain information about the account-a list of transactions, changes in values of stocks, etc.Įach PDF will be different, but similar because they follow a template. The cover page will always contain the bank’s logo, some legal boilerplate, the month and year, and a bland stock photo of happy customers doing something unrelated to banking, like this one. For instance, you might work for a bank that wants to produce end-of-month account statements for each of its 100,000 customers. When I talk about creating PDFs programmtically, I’m thinking of the situation where one wants to create a lot of PDFs that follow a template. BackgroundĬreating PDFs programmatically is a task most Python programmers encounter at least once. I’ll compare and contrast the two in another blog post. In this post I just want to describe the technique I’m advocating.
This technique offers some unique benefits, and in some common use cases-most importantly, perhaps in your case-it can be much more efficient than the alternative. In the talk and in this series, I advocate a technique for creating PDFs that uses LibreOffice (or OpenOffice) to do most of the hard work, and I contrast that to the common solution of using ReportLab (or a library like it). It’s the first of a series on this subject which is a bit too big for just one blog post. This post is a supplement to a talk I’m giving at PyOhio about using Python to create PDFs “the lazy way”.
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