Highlight text with Reportlab

[beetlecad]

Hi to all,
I am programming a project that make several PDFs with Python + Reportlab.

Before the program, I worked manually creating word files, where I highlighted the keywords that I found only in certain positions and not all the keywords in the text.

I can create PDFs with the text but on Reportlab there is no way to highlight the text that I print and that respects certain conditions.

I would like to understand if anyone has solved this problem or has any ideas.

Many thanks

[beetlecad]

I am coding a general function() that print a string if highlighted paramether is True,
paramether:
filename, pos_x, pos_y, dim_char, text_to_print, bolded, highlighted, high_color

This is one way but calling this function for more text not is performing for speed.

[Pedroski55]

I think you need to make yourself a "highlight function“，by calculating from the size of the font, then determining the size of the rectangle which would cover that, then draw a rectangle with the fill colour you want, then draw your text.

I did not calculate the necessary size of the rectangle here, because I am not sure how! I have done that before, but it was a while ago!

from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas
from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import A4

path2pdf = 'reportlab/pdfs/hello.pdf'

def hello(c):
    c.setFillColorRGB(1,1,1) # white text
    c.setFont("Helvetica", 30)
    c.drawString(100,100,"Hello World", )

def background(c):
    c.setFillColorRGB(1,0,0) # red background
    c.rect(95,95,165,35, stroke=0, fill=1)

c = canvas.Canvas(path2pdf, pagesize=A4)
background(c)
hello(c)
c.showPage() # closes the page, can't add more to this page
c.save()

reportlab is marvellous, but you need to work with it regularly to do things easily!

See the reportlab docs here.