WeasyPrint v54: Beta Time

Footnote Support

Thanks to Code & Co. who sponsored it, WeasyPrint now supports footnotes 🎉.

Footnotes allow you to put some notes at the bottom of a page, which let you provide comments, citations…

A Footnote Example

To create a footnote element, float: footnote is used. For example, a footnote statement that looks like this:

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<style>
  @page {
    margin: 0.5cm;
    size: 450px 100px;
    @footnote {
      border-top: 0.1mm solid;
      margin-top: 0.5em;
      padding-top: 0.5em;
    }
  }
  ::footnote-call {
    font-size: 0.7rem;
    line-height: 1;
    vertical-align: super;
  }
  body { margin: 0; }
  span { float: footnote; }
</style>
<div>
  I'm a nice text with a footnote<span>I'm the footnote</span>.
</div>

gives the following result:

Parallel Flows

For a long time, elements that aren’t in the normal flow, like floats or absolutes, weren’t breakable. So, if a float element was too long for a page, only the part fitting on the first page was rendered.

But now, with parallel flows, when a page break appears, we can display the rest of the float on the next page.

A Parallel Flow Example

As an example is better than a lot of words, let’s see what happens with WeasyPrint v53.4 and WeasyPrint v54.0b1 on this sample:

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<style>
    @page {
      margin: 0;
      size: 200px 30px;
    }
    div.floated {
      background: pink;
      float: left;
      max-width: 35%;
    }
    body {
      margin: 0;
      orphans: 1;
      widows: 1;
    }
</style>
<div class="floated">I'm a float</div>
<div>I'm in the normal flow</div>

And More…

Other features have been added in this version:

• Colored Emojis: When we replaced cairo by our own PDF generator, we lost support of colored emojis. But this time is over, colored emojis are back in the game, including vector emojis 🥳!
• Improvement of overflow-wrap: the overflow-wrap property now supports the value anywhere. This may help you dealing with text split, in tables for example.
• DLLs management for Windows: with Python 3.8, DLL resolution changed. You can now specify to WeasyPrint where to look for the DLLs with the environment variable WEASYPRINT_DLL_DIRECTORIES.
• text-align-all and text-align-last: these properties are now supported if you want to justify the last line of a paragraph.

Thanks a lot to our wonderful contributors for their hard work on this release 💜.

What Are the Next Steps?

The next main step is, of course, to make a real release of this version of WeasyPrint.

But before that, we need you to try this beta and report bugs you may found 🪲!

We’ll then be able to have a really nice version 54 😊.

Have fun with this beta 💜.