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Open source installation

reportlab verions >= 4.0

Installing for just PDF's is as easy as (probably best within a virtual environment);

pip install reportlab

For reportlab >4.0.4 if generating bitmaps make sure to add the PyCairo extension:

pip install "reportlab[pycairo]"

Optional extensions

We finalised our optional extensions in 4.0.4, make sure to have >=4.0.4 installed for the below instructions

Since ReportLab 4.0 we have moved to pure Python! This has massively reduced our build time but we appreciate some users may still want to take advantage of the acceleration packages so we have kept them as extra dependencies.

These are all available to build from source in our Mecurial Repository.

pip install "reportlab[accel]"

This holds the basic C acceleration code for speedup relating mainly to obtaining the length of strings. As Python itself has undergone considerable efficiencies, there is now less need for this package.

pip install "reportlab[renderpm]"

RenderPM was used to speedup the reportlab.graphics.renderPM functions and making bitmap images. This wraps up an old graphics engine we previously used, more recently we depend on PyCairo below as our default graphics engine.

pip install "reportlab[pycairo]"

rlPyCario (wrapper for IBM's Cairo) and freetype-py are used for construction of rich PDF documents, and also the creation of charts in a variety of bitmap and vector formats.

Older installations

ReportLab has been hosted on PyPi since 2006, to install a specific version use pip install reportlab==X.Y.Z. For example for the last version 3 package use pip installl reportlab==3.6.13.

For more specific 2.x installations, including those for Windows and OSX, see here.

Open source repositories

Our open source library is comprised of three core software packages (which should contain README files at the top level);

Package What it does Download Documentation
ReportLab open source Our proven, industry-strength PDF generating software that is the heart of our open source products Mercurial Repository See here
Preppy ReportLab's versatile text pre-processor Mercurial Repository See here
pyRXP The fastest validating XML parser available for Python Mercurial Repository See here