pythonpdfencodingpython-pdfkit

How to generate a PDF with non-ascii characters using from_string from python-pdfkit

I'm struggling to generate just a simple PDF with non-ascii characters using Python 3.5.2, python-pdfkit and wkhtmltox-0.12.2.

This is the easiest example I could write:

import pdfkit
html_content = u'<p>ö</p>'
pdfkit.from_string(html_content, 'out.pdf')

This is like the output document looks like: non-ascii character incorrectly shown in the PDF

Solution

  • I found out that I just needed to add a meta tag with charset attribute to my HTML code:

    import pdfkit

html_content = """
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
</head>
<body>
    <p>&euro;</p>
    <p>áéíóúñö</p>
<body>
</html>
"""

pdfkit.from_string(html_content, 'out.pdf')

    I actually spent quite some time following wrong solutions like the one suggested here. In case someone is interested, I wrote a short story on my blog. Sorry for the SPAM :)