I've been trying to create a PDF file from content that can be English, Persian, digits or a combination of them.
there is some problems with Persian texts like: "این یک متن فارسی است"
۱- the text must be written from right to left
2- there is a difference between characters in different positions in the word (meaning that characters change their shape according to their surrounding characters)
3- because the sentence is read from right to left then the normal textwrap doesn't work correctly.
On
In case anyone wants to generate pdfs from html templates using Django, this is how it can be done:
template = get_template("app_name/template.html")
context = Context({'something':some_variable})
html = template.render(context)
pdf = pdfkit.from_string(html, False)
response = HttpResponse(pdf, content_type='application/pdf')
response['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename=output.pdf'
return response
send multibyte (farsi , arabic) string as parameter to below typescript function, and put returned string to pdfMaker or any other PDF generator
farsiNew(farsistr){
// because pdfmake display it mirrored by default
var allText = '';
var point = 19;
var words = farsistr.split("\n");
var newword;
for(var i=0; i<=words.length-1; i++){
newword = words[i].split( ' ');
if (newword.length <point) {
allText = allText + newword.reverse().join(' ') + "\n";
}else{
for(var q =0; q<= Math.ceil (newword.length / point); q++) {
var s , t;
if (q === 0) {
s = 0; t = point;
}
else {
s = q * point + q;
t = s + point;
}
for (var v = t; v >= s; v--) {
if(!newword[v])
continue;
allText = allText + ' ' +newword[v]
}
allText = allText + '\n';
}
}
}
return allText;
}
After working for a while with Reportlab, we had some problems with organizing and formatting it. It took a lot of time and was kind of complicated. So we decided to work with pdfkit and jinja2. This way we can format and organize in html and CSS and we don't need to reformat Persian text too.
first we can design an html template file like the one below:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head lang="fa-IR">
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title></title>
</head>
<body >
<p dir="rtl">سوابق کاری</p>
<ul dir="rtl">
{% for experience in experiences %}
<li><a href="{{ experience.url }}">{{ experience.title }}</a></li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
</body>
</html>
and then we use jinja2 library to render our data into Template, and then use pdfkit to create a pdf from render result:
from jinja2 import Template
from pdfkit import pdfkit
sample_data = [{'url': 'http://www.google.com/', 'title': 'گوگل'},
{'url': 'http://www.yahoo.com/fa/', 'title': 'یاهو'},
{'url': 'http://www.amazon.com/', 'title': 'آمازون'}]
with open('template.html', 'r') as template_file:
template_str = template_file.read()
template = Template(template_str)
resume_str = template.render({'experiences': sample_data})
options = {'encoding': "UTF-8", 'quiet': ''}
bytes_array = pdfkit.PDFKit(resume_str, 'string', options=options).to_pdf()
with open('result.pdf', 'wb') as output:
output.write(bytes_array)
I used reportlab for creating PDf but unfortunately reportlab doesn't support Arabic and Persian alphabet so I used 'rtl' library by Vahid Mardani and 'pybidi' library by Meir Kriheli to make the text look right in PDF result.
first we need to add a font that supports Persian to reportlab:
in ubuntu 14.04:
add font and styles to reportlab:
in next step we need to reshape Persian text Letters to the right shape and make the direction of each word from right to left:
and for adding bullet or wrapping the text we could use following function:
for testing the code we can write: