Mrthfx

Recently I've written a library exactly for this purpose. It supports tables, plots, matrices and more.
https://github.com/JelteF/PyLaTeX

PyTeX is an Open Source project allowing to use TeX from within Python.

This question should be closed because it actually has nothing to do with LaTeX and is more suited for StackOverflow. In any case the answer is that just like with HTML the best way is to use a templating system like Jinja2 and just output a LaTeX file. Once you have a LaTeX file simply use the subprocess module to run pdflatex (obviously you need it installed on your server). Don't forget to use the "-interaction nonstopmode" flag. I could go into technical details but again it's really more suited for a different site.

Bit late for an answer, but would like to share my experience. I had a similar problem. Basically needed to get output from Python application in pdf form. Had a look at various alternatives

1. Jinja2


2. Reportlab


3. Pollyreports


4. As well as the options listed above

Eventually I settled on using Latex. Basically just wrote a small class that assembled my elements into a tex file and then ran pdflatex on the generated tex file. Other options had a lot of control, but tex already has great formatting predefined and I just needed a professional container for my figures and tables.

Depending on what you want to do, Sphinx may suit you. I think its the best Python-based tool for technical documentation, and it supports restructured text.

Is this what you're asking about? ( I used TeX to save code-space, but LaTeX is the same). If it is the what you're asking about, and you cut and paste this example, make sure the indents are correct after the paste.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys, os, os.path

filename = sys.argv[1]

opfile = sys.argv[1] + '.tex'

outfile = open(opfile, 'w')

pageAry = []

def a_tex_file(title):

    global pageAry

    pageAry.append('\vskip2emn\font\titlefont=cmr12 at 14.4ptn\font\default=cmr12n')

    pageAry.append('\def\today{January 21, 2011}n')

    pageAry.append('\centerline{\titlefont ' + title + '}n\vskip5ptn\vskip5pt\centerline{\default blahblahblah}n')

    pageAry.append('n\bye')

return 1



a_tex_file("blunk")



for i in pageAry:

    outfile.writelines(i)

outfile.close()

os.system('tex '+ opfile)

os.system('xdvi ' + filename + '.dvi & ')

While I love LaTeX, you probably don't want or need TeX to solve your problem. Check out ReportLab Toolkit

Depending on exactly what you want to do, you may want to take a look at plasTeX. It's a python version of the TeX engine. It's not a true LaTeX interpreter, but if you have control over the input format of the documents then it could be possible to write them in such a manner that plasTeX can render them. At present, it renders the document to XHTML.

So if you wanted web-viewable copies, you could have it so that your documents were sufficiently simple that plasTeX can read them, then use plasTeX for XHTML-rendering and call pdflatex externally for PDF.

PyX is a useful package if you want graphs and charts.

If you want to convert a web page into a pdf, maybe the better way is using the python-pisa package, perform a direct conversion, I used it in a django projects for this purpose.

check latexmake. It allows easily to create your pdf files with python.

Where does the data for the PDF you want to generate come from? A database?

I ask because (despite being a big Python fan) I once used PHP to generate a latex file with data populated from a database (this was for a very small conference proceedings). It's a bit messy, but works reasonably well; you can easily intermingle PHP code which pulls from the database with latex source, in the same way that you can mix PHP with HTML. Then just compile the resulting latex file to get a PDF.