Collaborating with django-renderpdf

[WhyNotHugo]

Hi! I maintain django-renderpdf, which I wrote back in 2017 to, well, render PDFs. It also uses weasyprint under the hood.

I've come across django-weasyprint a few times during the years. It seems that around 80% of what both projects do is the same. There's some duplicate effort going on between both projects. I'd like to contribute to django-weasyprint by merging any functionality that's missing, and then have a migration plan to transition projects from django-renderpdf into django-weasyprint.

I wanted to hear your thoughts on this and see if this sounds good to you too before actually doing anything.

From what I can tell, these are the biggest differences with django-renderpdf:

• Aside from PDF views, it also allows rendering a PDF outside of a request-response cycles (in particular, I generate a lot of PDFs in celery/rq tasks). This is done by having the rendering function outside of the View class.
• There's a custom django_url_fetcher that tries to resolve static files. This avoids network round-trips to reload the same CSS and PNG files over the network over and over again. I do think that your approach using a base_url is simpler for a lot of cases.
• A flag to prompt downloads the PDF instead of opening it in the browser.
• get_template_names
  uses the same convention as Django, to allow applications to override templates (django-afip relies on this to use a rather flexible template overriding mechanism in the same way as Django itself does for built-in views).
• Finally, there's published docs for all the public API.

[bbrendon]

@WhyNotHugo the link you provided to django-renderpdf doesn't work. 404.

Is your project better maintained than this?

[WhyNotHugo]

My bad, correct link here: https://github.com/WhyNotHugo/django-renderpdf/

[fdemmer]

Thank you for reaching out @WhyNotHugo!

In 2016 I also took over this code due to stagnant maintenance and am very much open to collaboration and/or merging of projects to keep it alive now. There should be one -- and preferably only one -- obvious way to do it. ;)

I'd like to contribute to django-weasyprint by merging any functionality that's missing, and then have a migration plan to transition projects from django-renderpdf into django-weasyprint.

That sounds like a good plan and I am open to accept pull-requests in that direction and probably subsequently handing over maintenance/access to this project's github/pypi.

[scur-iolus]

Any news regarding this collaboration @WhyNotHugo? Almost one year later, which library would you recommend to implement HTML to PDF conversion in a new Django project?

[WhyNotHugo]

No new really, haven't had any time to look further into this.

Both libraries have slightly different features, so check out which ones you need and pick based on that. Any other response that I can give is obviously biased.