selenium-print

selenium-print is an open-source Python package that enables printing HTML to PDF using the Selenium framework. This package is especially useful when you want to render dynamic content that requires a JS engine or ajax calls to a server or complex layouts using state-of-the-art CSS like grid, flexbox, media queries or transform.

Note: This library uses selenium which in turn requires the installation of the Google Chrome browser as well as a chromedriver. This librarydoes not support any other browser at the moment. This makes it not a lightweight solution for generating PDF files. But it does make an easy to setup PDF generation solution that supports ALL browser functionality. Also note that starting a selenium browser is not very fast either, so if your priority is not ease-of-use, but performance, this is not the library for you. Although in benchmarks with weasyprint, which seems to also have one of the most impressive HTML/CSS support, this framework beat it by an average of 33% time decrease.

Features

• Utilizes the full flexibility of the JS engine of the browser.
• Supports ajax calls to the server.
• Renders HTML to PDF.
• Easy to install and use.

Installation

You can install selenium-print using pip:

pip install selenium-print

Usage

Simple usage

The simplest way to use selenium-print is to use the utility method that wraps all logic.

from seleniumprint import file_to_pdf

input_html_file_path="/Users/user/path/to/input.html"
output_pdf_file_path="/Users/user/path/to/output.pdf"

file_to_pdf(input_html_file_path, output_pdf_file_path)

input_html_url="http://localhost:8000/report/1"
output_pdf_file_path="./report_pdfs/report_1.pdf"

url_to_pdf(input_html_url, output_pdf_file_path)

Class-Based Usage

Another way to use SeleniumPDF is to call the url_to_pdf method with a URL and an optional output file path:

from seleniumprint import SeleniumPDF

url = "https://www.example.com"
pdf_file_path = "example.pdf"

# Initialize SeleniumPDF
selenium_pdf = SeleniumPDF()

# Generate PDF from URL
selenium_pdf.url_to_pdf(url, pdf_file_path)`

In this example, SeleniumPDF is initialized with the default options and the url_to_pdf method is called with a URL and an output file path. The page at the specified URL is loaded and then converted to a PDF, which is saved to the specified file path, if an output file path was provided. If not it will return the raw bytes that you can work with.

Custom Waiting

If you need to wait for some time after loading the page before converting it to a PDF, you can use the load_page and convert_current_page_to_pdf methods separately and add a sleep in between or some other kind of waiting logic, e.g. a JS based logic. Here's an example:

from seleniumprint import SeleniumPDF
import time

url = "https://www.example.com"
pdf_file_path = "example.pdf"

# Initialize SeleniumPDF
selenium_pdf = SeleniumPDF()

# Load page and wait for 5 seconds
selenium_pdf.load_page(url)
time.sleep(5)

# Convert page to PDF and save to file
selenium_pdf.convert_current_page_to_pdf(pdf_file_path)

## Alternative JS-based waiting (needs appropriate HTML-side implementation)

selenium_pdf.load_page(url)

# wait manually until page is ready or some other condition is true
while selenium_pdf.driver.driver.execute_js("return window.readyState !== 'complete'"):
  time.sleep(0.5)

# Convert page to pdf now
selenium_pdf.convert_current_page_to_pdf(pdf_file_path)

In this example, load_page is called to load the page at the specified URL, and then a 5-second wait is added using the time.sleep function. Finally, convert_current_page_to_pdf is called to convert the loaded page to a PDF and save it to the specified file path.

Specifying chromedriver location

The constructor of SeleniumPDF as well as the utility method file_to_pdf and url_to_pdf take a chrome-driver specific argument called chrome_driver_path.

# Build path to HTML file relative to current script
html_file_path = os.path.join(script_dir, "test.html")

# Build path to output PDF file
pdf_file_path = os.path.join(script_dir, "test_direct.pdf")

# Generate PDF from HTML File Path
file_to_pdf(html_file_path, pdf_file_path, chrome_driver_path=CHROME_DRIVER_PATH)

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Here are some ways you can contribute:

• Report issues and bugs.
• Suggest new features or enhancements.
• Submit pull requests for bug fixes or new features.

Before submitting a pull request, please make sure that your code follows PEP 8 guidelines and includes tests.

Support

This is a personal project, so support may be limited. However, I will do my best to answer any issues that are reported.

License

This project is published under MIT license which means its basically free to use for everyone in any way whatsoever.