Announcing ReportLab 4.5.0 - 30/04/2026

We’re happy to announce versions 4.5.0 of our ReportLab PLUS (our commercial package) and reportlab (Open Source) packages.

New Features

• Added support for blockTable shadow attribute.

  

  • shadow=”ShadowStyle(dx=4,dy=-4,color0=’green’,color1=’lite_green’,nshades=100)”>

    • dx - sets the x position of the shade box related to the table

    • dy - sets the y position of the shade box related to the table

    • color0 - Main shade color

    • color1 - lighter shade color

    • nshades - number of shades between color0 and color1

• Added angleRange to Pie & Doughnut to allow for less than 360 degrees to represent 100%, added in 4.4.1

  

  A sample Pie chart with a startAngle and an endAngle.

• Added support for REPORTLAB_PLUS_LICENCE environment variable to be used as a secret for watermark removal (commercial feature), added in 4.4.2

  

  Options for passing in the licence info.

• Added support for wordSpace in <drawString> and similar tags, where charSpace is the space between characters and wordSpace is the space between words, added in 4.4.4

  

  Illustration of text with various character and word spacing.

• Improved colors.cssParsecsuggested by Moritz Schreiber, to allow RGB CSS colors to be used with floating numbers directly to create colors that match floating numbers provided. Allow alpha channel by using "/” to add transparency values.

  

  Side by side image showing how to set RGB colors with transparency.

• Changes to RML <frame x2/width y2/height> to set width and heights.

  

  Image showing how to use the new x2 and y2 attributes to set a frameHeight

• Added support for RML <docElif cond=expr/>

<story>
    <docAssign var="i" expr="4"/>
    <docIf cond="i==5">
        <para>This is the IF</para>
    <docElif cond="i==4"/>
        <para>This is the Elif</para>
    </docIf>
</story>

• Allow svg src in rml para..img tags; PlusCanvas drawImage allows drawings img-allows-svg.

• Added placePara/XPre drawOnce attribute to stop repeated drawings.

• Added new default “None” to mean no-draw in acroform.py.

• Extended allowTableBoundsErrors scope to stop negative available heights tracebacks. Expected values: 0 = suppress nothing, 1 = suppress cell, 2 = suppress table, 3 = suppress all.

Security

• Fixed callback security hole reported by Pedro gankd;

• Applied FIPS changes ie md5 has usedforsecurity=False; patch in open source from Martin Renters.

Bugfixes

• Bug fixes to Fieldreader.py and added xmlSafe arguments.

• Bug fixes in tagType as Artifact for crossMark and showBoundary rects;

• Bug fix handling of <td> tagging attrs RowSpan/ColSpan;

• Bug fix for broken anchor placement in PlacedStory.

Accessibility

• Fixed tagging for failing/missing required==False inline==False image.

• Fixed tagged link altText handling.

• Improved RML table summary on page split.

Dependency Changes

• Moved extformat.py from reportlab/lib.

• Dropped support for python versions < 3.9.

• Removed chardet dependency;

Examples

• Added an x-reversed image illustration example.

• Added a new example demonstrating repeating several nested table headings and subheadings on overflow.

Full release notes are here…