PDF View in Plone with z3c.rml

First you add the z3c.rml package to the eggs section in your buildout.cfg:

# Add additional eggs here
# elementtree is required by Plone
eggs =
    z3c.rml

Next you write a new view class for the PDF view. A nifty way is to subclass the view class already in use for the (standard html) view

from zope.app.pagetemplate.viewpagetemplatefile import ViewPageTemplateFile
from z3c.rml.rml2pdf import parseString

class NiceViewPDF(NiceView):
    
    def __call__(self):
        self.request.response.setHeader('content-type', 'application/pdf')
        rml_doc = ViewPageTemplateFile('templates/nice_view_pdf.pt')(self)
        return parseString(rml_doc.encode('utf-8')).read()

The last thing you need is a 'nice_view_pdf.pt' template file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE document SYSTEM "http://www.reportlab.com/docs/rml.dtd">
<document filename="template.pdf"
          xmlns:tal="http://xml.zope.org/namespaces/tal"
          xmlns:i18n="http://xml.zope.org/namespaces/i18n"
          i18n:domain="mydomain">

    <template pageSize="A4" author="www.seantis.ch" title="Title">
        <pageTemplate id="main">
           <frame id="first" x1="72" y1="70" width="451" height="600"/>
       </pageTemplate>
    </template>

    <story>

        <h1 tal:content="python: context.Title()">Title</h1>

    </story>

</document>

(example from: http://svn.zope.org/z3c.rml/trunk/src/z3c/rml/tests/input/)

"RML Reference": http://svn.zope.org/z3c.rml/trunk/src/z3c/rml/rml-reference.pdf?view=auto