Question

I have a WSGI application that generates invoices and stores them as PDF.

So far I have solved similar problems with FPDF (or equivalents), generating the PDF from scratch like a GUI. Sadly this means the entire formatting logic (positioning headers, footers and content, styling) is in the application, where it really shouldn t be.

As the templates already exist in Office formats (ODT, DOC, DOCX), I would prefer to simply use those as a basis and fill in the actual content. I ve found the Appy framework, which does pretty much that with annotated ODT files.

That still leaves the bigger problem open, tho: converting ODT (or DOC, or DOCX) to PDF. On a server. Running Linux. Without GUI libraries. And thus, without OO.o or MS Office.

Is this at all possible or am I better off keeping the styling in my code?

The actual content that would be filled in is actually quite restricted: a few paragraphs, some of which may be optional, a headline or two, always at the same place, and a few rows of a table. In HTML this would be trivial.

EDIT: Basically, I want a library that can generate ODT files from ODF files acting as templates and a library that can convert the result into PDF (which is probably the crux).

Answer 1

I don t know how to go about automatic ODT -> PDF conversion, but a simpler route might be to generate your invoices as HTML and convert them to PDF using http://www.xhtml2pdf.com/. I haven t tried the library myself, but it definitely seems promising.

Answer 2

You can use QTextDocument, QTextCursor and QTextDocumentWriter in PyQt4. A simple example to show how to write to an odt file:

>>>from pyqt4 import QtGui
# Create a document object
>>>doc = QtGui.QTextDocument()
# Create a cursor pointing to the beginning of the document
>>>cursor = QtGui.QTextCursor(doc)
# Insert some text
>>>cursor.insertText( Hello world )
# Create a writer to save the document
>>>writer = QtGui.QTextDocumentWriter()
>>>writer.supportedDocumentFormats()
[PyQt4.QtCore.QByteArray(b HTML ), PyQt4.QtCore.QByteArray(b ODF ), PyQt4.QtCore.QByteArray(b plaintext )]
>>>odf_format = writer.supportedDocumentFormats()[1]
>>>writer.setFormat(odf_format)
>>>writer.setFileName( hello_world.odt )
>>>writer.write(doc) # Return True if successful
True

If not sure the difference between odt and odf in this case. I checked the file type and it said application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text . So I assume it is odt. You can print to a pdf file by using QPrinter.

More information at: http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/

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