PDF

PDF

Author the PDF with reportlab, then get its bytes. Prefer the Platypus flowable API (SimpleDocTemplate over a BytesIO, with Paragraph, Table, Spacer, and getSampleStyleSheet) over hand-placed canvas coordinates.

Authoring rules

• Use A4 unless US Letter is implied. Use margins of at least 18 mm (0.7 in), 10–11 pt body text, and 1.3–1.5 line height.
• Structure the document with a title, headings, justified body text, and tables built from Table/TableStyle where the data invites them.
• ReportLab's Paragraph parses a small XML markup, so escape &, <, and > in any source text (xml.sax.saxutils.escape) before placing it.
• The built-in fonts (Helvetica, Times) are Latin-1 only. For broader Unicode, register a TrueType font with pdfmetrics.registerFont(TTFont(...)) if one is available; otherwise keep the text within Latin-1.
• Do not embed Page X of Y folios; the viewer supplies its own page indicator.
• Build to a BytesIO and read the bytes back; do not write a file to disk.