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 require the use of write_html method:

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/PyFPDF/fpdf2">PyFPDF/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><li>unordered</li><li>list</li><li>items</li></ul>
    <ol><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")

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)
• <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>: (and border, width attributes)
  • <thead>: header (opens each page)
  • <tfoot>: footer (closes each page)
  • <tbody>: actual rows
  • <tr>: rows (with bgcolor attribute)
  • <th>: heading cells (with align, bgcolor, width attributes)
  • <td>: cells (with align, bgcolor, width attributes)

Notes:

• tables should have at least a first <th> row with a width attribute.
• currently table cells can only contain a single line, cf. issue 91. Contributions are welcome to add support for multi-line text in them! 😊