How to create PDF files

The advantage of generating PDF files dynamically is that you can create customized PDFs for different purposes – say, for different users or different pieces of content.

For example, Django was used at kusports.com to generate customized, printer-friendly NCAA tournament brackets, as PDF files, for people participating in a March Madness contest.

The ReportLab library is . A user guide (not coincidentally, a PDF file) is also available for download. You can install ReportLab with :

Linux/MacOS Windows

If that command doesn’t raise any errors, the installation worked.

The key to generating PDFs dynamically with Django is that the ReportLab API acts on file-like objects, and Django’s objects accept file-like objects.

Here’s a “Hello World” example:

The code and comments should be self-explanatory, but a few things deserve a mention:

The response will automatically set the MIME type application/pdf based on the filename extension. This tells browsers that the document is a PDF file, rather than an HTML file or a generic application/octet-stream binary content.
When as_attachment=True is passed to FileResponse, it sets the appropriate Content-Disposition header and that tells web browsers to pop-up a dialog box prompting/confirming how to handle the document even if a default is set on the machine. If the parameter is omitted, browsers will handle the PDF using whatever program/plugin they’ve been configured to use for PDFs.
You can hook into the ReportLab API: The same buffer passed as the first argument to canvas.Canvas can be fed to the FileResponse class.
Note that all subsequent PDF-generation methods are called on the PDF object (in this case, p) – not on .

ReportLab is not thread-safe. Some of our users have reported odd issues with building PDF-generating Django views that are accessed by many people at the same time.

Notice that there isn’t a lot in these examples that’s PDF-specific – just the bits using reportlab. You can use a similar technique to generate any arbitrary format that you can find a Python library for. Also see for another example and some techniques you can use when generated text-based formats.