GSoc proposal : A django pdfs library.

[Anuttam Anand]

Hello to all my djangomates. I am Anuttam Anand, Btech student from India. For this year's GSoc , I am thinking of making a proposal for a more efficient and feature containing pdf library. Upon researching , I found ReportLab to be the pdf making library in django but it lacks many features and has been reported to be buggy. 

Features which I am thinking of including:

1. A direct webpage conversion to pdf and containing atleast 80% of css.

2. An option to download or keep the pdf in the server itself , location parameter which is specified by the programmer.

3. An option to download the pdf to the user's device upon calling the function.

Motivation:

1. The main motivation behind this project is that many websites need pdfs like transaction receipts or some reports which are downloaded.

2. I personally faced this issue a while ago and has to manually download my webpages to contain the css as some other libraries do download the pdf but results in loss of css and thus the design and quality.

I hope to get an opinion and advice and if I have missed some package or if anyone thinks of some more features, I will be happy to listen.

Thanking You

Anuttam Anand

[Carlton Gibson]

Hi Anuttam. 

I’d guess that a PDF library itself would be out of scope for Django itself — but this is a perennial problem. 

**Quite maybe** a project to modernise the Outputting PDFs with Django docs would be in scope... 🤔

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/howto/outputting-pdf/

Questions that you could cover: 

What is the best way to do it these days? What dependencies does that involve? 

Are there helpers we could add to Django? (And so on.) 

An awesome proposal there might swing it. (I can’t say definitely.) 

(Even if it didn’t make GSoC, such a proposal would convert well into a profile blog piece, so if you’re keen it might be worth the punt.) 

I hope that helps. 

Kind regards, Carlton 

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[Anuttam Anand]

Hey Carlton,

Thanks for responding . This is my first open source project and I'm pretty scared . But my view is to add features for a django pdf library , features which other frameworks have and are not in current scope like in ReportLab.

After doing some research , I have found some python based APIs and existing libraries , not very refined but possible to use with django. Since they require a lot of dependencies, making a whole package of the thing will be more efficient for the user. I hope you and all others can give me more advice and if you people know anymore libraries or similar packages. P.S if you guys have any more features which you think a pdf conversion package should have , I would be glad to hear them.

Again thanks 

- Anuttam Anand

[Anuttam Anand]

Hey Carton ,

I have made my final proposal , please let me know for any additional points or advice.

Google Docs Link : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HPi0hI3BlVRuUiq2JPxKxm_jnGwjfqhCczWaDHUWhSE/edit?usp=sharing

[Anuttam Anand]

Hey , 

Can anyone please let me know if I have to include other things for my final proposal or should I submit ?

Thanks.

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[Carlton Gibson]

Hi Anuttam — If you're happy I'd submit. I'm afraid I don't have capacity to pre-review before the deadline here. 

Good luck. 

Kind Regards,

Carlton