flask-tex

flask-tex offers helper functions for using LaTeX from within a Flask app. flask-tex requires a local LaTeX installation and uses pdflatex by default.

Usage

Import flask_tex.render_to_pdf and use it like flask.render_template in your view function.

from flask import Flask
from flask_tex import render_to_pdf


app = Flask(__name__)


@app.route("/")
def return_pdf_response():
    return render_to_pdf("tex_template.tex", foo="Hello World!")

Your template might look like this and should be located in place where flask can find it.

\documentclass{article}

\title{Using \LaTeX{} with Flask}

\begin{document}

\maketitle

{{ foo }}

\end{document}

For lower level access to LaTeX, use flask.compile_source:

from flask_tex import compile_source

pdf = compile_source(source, command="pdflatex")

where source is a string containing a tex document and command is a string defining the LaTeX command to use for compiling the source. The string should contain any optional flags you would like to pass to the LaTeX executable. The default command is pdflatex, but you can supply others, e.g. latexmk -pdf. pdf is a bytes object containing the pdf file.

compile_source runs LaTeX inside a temporary directory. Use flask_tex.run_tex to circumvent this and run LaTeX in a directory of your choice:

from flask_tex import run_tex

pdf = run_tex(source, command="pdflatex", directory="/foo/bar/")

Jinja integration

For deeper jinja integration, use flask_tex as an extension:

from flask import Flask
from flask_tex import TeX

app = Flask(__app__)
TeX(app)

This adds some LaTeX specific filters to the jinja environment.

• LaTeX escape: {{ foo | latex_escape }} where foo = "&$%#_{}" renders as "\\&\\$\\%\\#\\_\\{\\}". Danger: Do not use this in a html template, because the escaped string is marked as safe with Markup, so code that might be dangerous in html does not get escaped.

• LaTeX linebreaks: The linebreaks filter converts \n into \\\\\n.