title: ReportLab Paragraph and text formatting
body: <p>My issue is that when using reportlab to generate a simple text document it loses all of the formatting. I've run it through a few times to try and debug it and the issue seems to be, when passing the <code>msgStr</code> to <code>Paragraph</code> it loses all of the formatting sent with it.</p>
  
  <p>Does anyone know how to generate a simple pdf whilst maintaining the current text formatting</p>
  
  <p>Code:</p>
  
  <pre><code># PDF GENERATION LIBRARIES
  # import the report lab PDF generation tools
  from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter
  from reportlab.lib.styles import ParagraphStyle
  from reportlab.lib.units import inch
  from reportlab.platypus import SimpleDocTemplate, Paragraph, Spacer, PageBreak
  from reportlab.pdfbase import pdfmetrics
  from reportlab.pdfbase.ttfonts import TTFont
  Parts = []
  
  def sumFile(msgStr = None, COMPLETE = 0):
  
      pdfmetrics.registerFont(TTFont('Inconsolata', 'Inconsolata-Regular.ttf'))
  
      summaryName = SimpleDocTemplate(vehID+".pdf")
  
      style = ParagraphStyle(
          name='Normal',
          fontName='Inconsolata',
          fontSize=8,
      )
  
      msgStr.replace('\n','&lt;br /&gt;')
  
      if msgStr == "PageBreak":
          parts.append(PageBreak())
      else:
          parts.append(msgStr)
  
      if COMPLETE == 1:
          genStr = "Generated using " + progName + " " + str(progVers)
          parts.append(genStr)
          print parts
          summaryName.build(Paragraph(parts, style))
  
  if __name__ == "__main__":    
      sumFile("%9s %s\n" % ("Bobby", "Sue"))
      sumFile("{0:12}{1:7}{2:5}deg_C\tsmp {3}\n".format("20", "1000", "3.0", "535"))
      sumFile("{0} {1}\n\n".format("09/06/2016", "11:51:39"))
  </code></pre>