Create a link with QPdfWriter

I'm writing a GUI application in Python using the PySide6 library, and I want to write PDFs. I usually use the reportlab library for writing PDFs, but I see that PySide6 has a QPdfWriter class. I'd like to avoid an extra dependency on reportlab if PySide6 is sufficient, but I can't see a way to create a link in the PDF, either to a section of the document or to a web site.

Is it possible to add a link to a PDF with QPdfWriter, or will it only support drawing and text?

Here's an example where I create a PDF with some text, and I'd like to turn the text into a link to the web page.

from PySide6.QtGui import QPdfWriter, QPainter, QPageSize
from PySide6.QtWidgets import QApplication

app = QApplication()
pdf = QPdfWriter('example.pdf')
pdf.setPageSize(QPageSize.Letter)
painter = QPainter(pdf)
painter.drawText(painter.window().width()//2,
                 painter.window().height()//2,
                 'https://donkirkby.github.io')
painter.end()

Solution

One possible solution is to use QTextDocument:

from PySide6.QtGui import QGuiApplication, QPageSize, QPdfWriter, QTextDocument

app = QGuiApplication()

html = "<a href='https://donkirkby.github.io'>https://donkirkby.github.io</a>"


pdf = QPdfWriter("example.pdf")
pdf.setPageSize(QPageSize.Letter)

document = QTextDocument()
document.setHtml(html)
document.print_(pdf)

You can use QWebEnginePage, it is not yet available in Qt6 so PySide2 should be used for the example:

from PySide2.QtWidgets import QApplication
from PySide2.QtWebEngineWidgets import QWebEnginePage

app = QApplication()

html = """
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Title of the document</title>
    <style>
        .container {
            position: absolute;
            top: 50%;
            left: 50%;
            -moz-transform: translateX(-50%) translateY(-50%);
            -webkit-transform: translateX(-50%) translateY(-50%);
            transform: translateX(-50%) translateY(-50%);
        }
    </style>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div class="container">
        <a href='https://donkirkby.github.io'>https://donkirkby.github.io</a>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>
"""

page = QWebEnginePage()


def handle_load_finished():
    page.printToPdf("example.pdf")


def handle_pdf_printing_finished():
    app.quit()


page.loadFinished.connect(handle_load_finished)
page.pdfPrintingFinished.connect(handle_pdf_printing_finished)

page.setHtml(html)


app.exec_()