Django-tex is a simple Django app to render LaTeX templates and compile them into PDF files.

Django-tex requires a local LaTeX installation and uses the jinja2 templating engine for template rendering.

django-tex is currently available on test.pypi.org. It can be installed by:

pip install --index-url https://test.pypi.org/simple/ django_tex

To make this work, the requirements (django and jinja2) may need to be installed separately via pip install django and pip install jinja2, respectively.

1. Add "django_tex" to your INSTALLED_APPS setting:

   INSTALLED_APPS = [
       ...
       'django_tex',
   ]

2. Configure a template engine named tex in settings.py:

   TEMPLATES = [
       {
           'NAME': 'tex',
           'BACKEND': 'django_tex.engine.TeXEngine', 
           'APP_DIRS': True,
       },
   ]

3. Create a LaTeX template in your template directory:

   # test.tex
   \documentclass{article}
   
   \begin{document}
   
   \section{ {{- foo -}} }
   
   \end{document}

4. Use "compile_template_to_pdf" in your code to get the PDF file as a bytes object:

   from django_tex.core import compile_template_to_pdf
   
   template_name = 'test.tex'
   context = {'foo': 'Bar'}
   PDF = compile_template_to_pdf(template_name, context)

   Or use render_to_pdf to generate a HTTPResponse containing the PDF file:

   from django_tex.views import render_to_pdf
   
   def view(request):
       template_name = 'test.tex'
       context = {'foo': 'Bar'}
       return render_to_pdf(request, template_name, context, filename='test.pdf')

The default LaTeX interpreter is set to lualatex. This can be changed by the setting LATEX_INTERPRETER, for instance: LATEX_INTERPRETER = 'pdflatex'. Of course, the interpreter needs to be installed on your system for django-tex to work properly.

Since django-tex uses jinja, you can use jinja's whitespace control in LaTeX templates. For example, \section{ {{ foo }} } would be rendered as \section{ Bar } with the above context; \section{ {{- foo -}} }, however, gets rendered nicely as \section{Bar}.

Django's built-in filters are available. So you can use {{ foo|date('d. F Y') }} to get 1. Januar 2018, for instance.

Further, django-tex adds the custom filter localize to the jinja environment. This runs its input through django.utils.formats.localize_input to create a localized representation. The output depends on the USE_L10N and LANGUAGE_CODE settings. Use the filter like this: {{ foo|localize }}.

If you want to convert linebreaks into LaTeX linebreaks (\\), use the linebreaks filter ({{ foo | linebreaks }}).

Custom filters can be defined as explained in the jinja documentation here. For example, the following filter formats a datetime.timedelta object as a hh:mm string:

def hhmm_format(value):
    total_seconds = value.total_seconds()
    hours, remainder = divmod(total_seconds, 3600)
    minutes, seconds = divmod(remainder, 60)
    return '{:n}:{:02n}'.format(hours, minutes)

The filter has to be added to a custom environment and the django-tex templating engine has to be made aware of the environment. This can be achieved, for example, by defining a custom environment callable in an environment.py module in your app:

# environment.py
from django_tex.environment import environment

def hhmm_format(value):
    pass # as above

def my_environment(**options):
    env = environment(**options)
    env.filters.update({
        'hhmm_format': hhmm_format
    })
    return env

... and passing the dotted path to my_environment to the TEMPLATES settings:

# settings.py

TEMPLATES = [
    {
        'NAME': 'tex',
        'BACKEND': 'django_tex.engine.TeXEngine', 
        'APP_DIRS': True,
        'OPTIONS': {
            'environment': 'myapp.environment.my_environment',
        }
    },
]