Introduction¶

rinohtype was initially conceived as a modern replacement for LaTeX. An important goal in the design of rinohtype is for documents to be much easier to customize than in LaTeX. By today’s standards, the arcane TeX macro language upon which LaTeX is built makes customization unnecessarily difficult for one. Simply being built with Python makes rinohtype already much easier to approach than TeX. Additionally, rinohtype is built around the following core concepts to ensure customizability:

Document Templates

These determine the page layout and (for longer documents) the different parts of your document. The templates included with rinohtype are highly configurable and allow changing margins, headers, footers, chapter titles, etc. If this is not sufficient, a custom template can be created.

Style Sheets

The CSS-inspired style sheets determine the look of individual document elements. A style sheet assigns style attributes to each type of document element. For example, a paragraph’s style is determined by the typeface, font weight, size and color, horizontal alignment of text etc.

Structured Input

rinohtype renders a document from a document tree that does not describe any style aspects but only semantics. The style sheet maps specific style properties to the elements in this document tree. The document tree can be automatically generated from a structured document format such as reStructuredText and CommonMark using one of the included frontends, or it can be constructed manually.

rinohtype is implemented as a Python package and doubles as a high-level PDF library. Its modular design makes it easy to to customize and extend for specific applications. Moreover, because rinotype’s source code is open, all of its internals can be inspected and even modified, making it customizable at all levels.

Usage Examples¶

rinohtype supports three modes of operation, which are discussed in more detail in the Quickstart guide. For each of these modes, you can choose to use one of the document templates included with rinohtype or a third-party template available from PyPI and optionally customize it to your needs. Or you can create a custom template from scratch. The same is true for the style sheet used to style the document elements.

Command-Line Renderer¶

rinohtype includes the rinoh command-line tool which renders structured text documents. Currently, reStructuredText and CommonMark documents are supported in the open-source version. Support for DITA is available in the commercially supported Pro version.

Rendering the reStructuredText demonstration article demo.txt (using the standard article template and style sheet) generates demo.pdf.

Sphinx Builder¶

Configuring rinohtype as a builder for Sphinx allows rendering a Sphinx project to PDF without the need for a LaTeX installation. The version of this documentation as rendered by rinohtype can be downloaded from the sidebar (‘PDF’ links).

High-level PDF library¶

rinohtype can also be used as a Python library to generate PDF documents. Just like with rinoh and the Sphinx builder, you can select which document template and style sheet to use.

Additionally, you need to supply a document tree. This document tree can be parsed from a structured document format such as reStructuredText by using one of the provided frontends or built manually using building blocks provided by rinohtype. You can also write a frontend for a custom format such as an XML dialect.

All of these approaches allow for parts of the content to be fetched from a database or other data sources. When parsing the document tree from a structured document format, a templating engine like Jinja2 can be used.