The ReportLab Toolkit: our mature, Open Source PDF library

The ReportLab Open Source PDF library is a proven industry-strength PDF generating solution, that you can use for meeting your requirements and deadlines in enterprise reporting systems.

The easy way to PDF

For latest features, see the Release Note.

Our free Open Source PDF library is suitable for web publishers, developers or creative design professionals who need to quickly and easily create or automate complex (even data-driven) documents. It lets you create professional documents programmatically without being locked into one special technology and/or platform. It has grown over years in response to the real-world requirements of large financial institutions' reporting needs, making it the trusted proven foundation of existing enterprise solutions rather than a just a fancy gimmick or interesting library.

This library implements a flexible layout engine named Platypus that builds documents from components like headlines, paragraphs, fonts, tables, bitmap images, vector graphics, etc. These flowable elements are placed in a document "story" following a set of templates for frames, pages and the entire document itself. In addition to the standard 14 PostScript fonts there is full support for custom embedded Type-1 as well as for Asian fonts. The included graphics subpackage provides a set of primitive shapes as well as reusable widgets building on them. Among the sample collections is a very useful set of business chart diagrams, including bar charts, line charts and pie charts. Different renderers can be used to create vector graphics (in fact, even full document pages) as individual components not only in PDF, but also in EPS and in a variety of bitmap formats including JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP and PICT.

Features

• Create professional portable documents
• Real document layout engine (Platypus)
• Flowable objects such as paragraphs, headlines, tables, images, graphics, etc.
• Arbitrary Type-1 fonts
• Bitmap images, vector graphics
• Library of reusable primitive shapes
• Extensible widget library
• Uses Python, a clean OO language
• Layered architecture
• Includes simple demos and more complex tools
• Allows for any data sources
• Fully available source code
• Strong community support
• Platform-independent
• Includes PythonPoint - PDF Presentation Tool