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.