Best Practices

Tipps and Best Practices.

Designing the Certificate: Layouting

The layout is created by drawing elements on a canvas. Elements are placed on the canvas by assigning them coordinates. This can be time-intensive and try-and-error.

Design a layout, save it as background in the beginning and place elements accordingly.

Designing the Certificate: Elements

Adding new elements will add them on top of existing elements at the coordinates.

Consider there is a header and footer section in the document canvas by default. To content or change these sections one needs to overwrite the header and footer methods:

# create and use a new class that inherits from FPDF
class PDF(FPDF):
    def header(self):
        pass  # do your stuff

    def footer(self):
        pass  # do your stuff

Design vs. Signing and Encryption

A convenient way to design certificates is use to a PDF with a generic layout (e.g., designed in a design application), create a new PDF with the individual information and merge both to a new PDF.

See Adding content onto an existing PDF page

Downside: PDF created this way can not be signed or encrypted.

Markdown in text for PDFs

You can use markdown in the text for the PDFs. Make sure to load fonts for bold and italic text like:

regular-text-font-name, typeface, path-to-font-file, e.g.,

fpdf.add_font("poppins-regular", "B", font.parents[1] / "Poppins/Poppins-Bold.ttf")