Creating PDF¶

PDF is certainly one of the most complicated formats out there. And certainly one of the formats most of the developers will be having trouble with, as there are many versions and dialects. That makes it almost challenging to create one way of making PDF files. That’s why, creation of PDF files have been delegated to flexible abstraction layer - PDF generators. If you don’t like how PDF files are generated, you can create your own layer, using your favourite library.

Currently, there are two PDF generators:

PdfkitPdfGenerator (default), built on top of the pdfkit and wkhtmltopdf.
ReportlabPdfGenerator, build on top of the famous reportlab.

Building PDF using pdfkit ¶

While pdfkit generator is a heavier and has wkhtmltopdf as a system dependency, it’s produces better quality PDF and has no issues with fonts or unicode characters.

See the following full functional snippet for generating PDF using pdfkit.

# Imports
from faker import Faker
from faker_file.providers.pdf_file import PdfFileProvider
from faker_file.providers.pdf_file.generators.pdfkit_generator import (
    PdfkitPdfGenerator,
)

FAKER = Faker() # Initialize Faker
FAKER.add_provider(PdfFileProvider)  # Register PdfFileProvider

# Generate PDF file using `pdfkit`
pdf_file = FAKER.pdf_file(pdf_generator_cls=PdfkitPdfGenerator)

The generated PDF will have 10,000 characters of text, which is about 2 pages.

If you want PDF with more pages, you could either:

Increase the value of max_nb_chars accordingly.
Set value of wrap_chars_after to 80 characters to force longer pages.
Insert manual page breaks and other content.

See the example below for max_nb_chars tweak:

# Generate PDF file of 20,000 characters
pdf_file = FAKER.pdf_file(
    pdf_generator_cls=PdfkitPdfGenerator, max_nb_chars=20_000
)

See the example below for wrap_chars_after tweak:

# Generate PDF file, wrapping each line after 80 characters
pdf_file = FAKER.pdf_file(
    pdf_generator_cls=PdfkitPdfGenerator, wrap_chars_after=80
)

As mentioned above, it’s possible to diversify the generated context with images, paragraphs, tables, manual text break and pretty much everything that is supported by PDF format specification, although currently only images, paragraphs, tables and manual text breaks are supported out of the box. In order to customise the blocks PDF file is built from, the DynamicTemplate class is used. See the example below for usage examples:

# Additional imports
from faker_file.base import DynamicTemplate
from faker_file.contrib.pdf_file.pdfkit_snippets import (
    add_page_break,
    add_paragraph,
    add_picture,
    add_table,
)

# Create a PDF file with paragraph, picture, table and manual page breaks
# in between the mentioned elements. The ``DynamicTemplate`` simply
# accepts a list of callables (such as ``add_paragraph``,
# ``add_page_break``) and dictionary to be later on fed to the callables
# as keyword arguments for customising the default values.
pdf_file = FAKER.pdf_file(
    pdf_generator_cls=PdfkitPdfGenerator,
    content=DynamicTemplate(
        [
            (add_paragraph, {}),  # Add paragraph
            (add_page_break, {}),  # Add page break
            (add_picture, {}),  # Add picture
            (add_page_break, {}),  # Add page break
            (add_table, {}),  # Add table
            (add_page_break, {}),  # Add page break
        ]
    )
)

# You could make the list as long as you like or simply multiply for
# easier repetition as follows:
pdf_file = FAKER.pdf_file(
    pdf_generator_cls=PdfkitPdfGenerator,
    content=DynamicTemplate(
        [
            (add_paragraph, {}),  # Add paragraph
            (add_page_break, {}),  # Add page break
            (add_picture, {}),  # Add picture
            (add_page_break, {}),  # Add page break
            (add_table, {}),  # Add table
            (add_page_break, {}),  # Add page break
        ] * 100  # Will repeat your config 100 times
    )
)

Building PDFs using reportlab ¶

While reportlab generator is much lighter than the pdfkit and does not have system dependencies, but might produce PDF files with questionable encoding when generating unicode text.

See the following full functional snippet for generating PDF using reportlab.

# Imports
from faker import Faker
from faker_file.providers.pdf_file import PdfFileProvider
from faker_file.providers.pdf_file.generators.reportlab_generator import (
    ReportlabPdfGenerator,
)

# Generate PDF file using `reportlab`
pdf_file = FAKER.pdf_file(pdf_generator_cls=ReportlabPdfGenerator)

All examples shown for pdfkit apply for reportlab generator, however when building PDF files from blocks (paragraphs, images, tables and page breaks), the imports shall be adjusted:

As mentioned above, it’s possible to diversify the generated context with images, paragraphs, tables, manual text break and pretty much everything that is supported by PDF format specification, although currently only images, paragraphs, tables and manual text breaks are supported. In order to customise the blocks PDF file is built from, the DynamicTemplate class is used. See the example below for usage examples:

# Additional imports
from faker_file.base import DynamicTemplate
from faker_file.contrib.pdf_file.reportlab_snippets import (
    add_page_break,
    add_paragraph,
    add_picture,
    add_table,
)

# Create a PDF file with paragraph, picture, table and manual page breaks
# in between the mentioned elements. The ``DynamicTemplate`` simply
# accepts a list of callables (such as ``add_paragraph``,
# ``add_page_break``) and dictionary to be later on fed to the callables
# as keyword arguments for customising the default values.
pdf_file = FAKER.pdf_file(
    pdf_generator_cls=ReportlabPdfGenerator,
    content=DynamicTemplate(
        [
            (add_paragraph, {}),  # Add paragraph
            (add_page_break, {}),  # Add page break
            (add_picture, {}),  # Add picture
            (add_page_break, {}),  # Add page break
            (add_table, {}),  # Add table
            (add_page_break, {}),  # Add page break
        ]
    )
)

# You could make the list as long as you like or simply multiply for
# easier repetition as follows:
pdf_file = FAKER.pdf_file(
    pdf_generator_cls=ReportlabPdfGenerator,
    content=DynamicTemplate(
        [
            (add_paragraph, {}),  # Add paragraph
            (add_page_break, {}),  # Add page break
            (add_picture, {}),  # Add picture
            (add_page_break, {}),  # Add page break
            (add_table, {}),  # Add table
            (add_page_break, {}),  # Add page break
        ] * 100
    )
)

Creating PDF¶

Building PDF using pdfkit¶

Building PDFs using reportlab¶

Building PDF using pdfkit ¶

Building PDFs using reportlab ¶