Never mind, flowables have drawOn(). If I had only set up PythonWin's class browser *sooner*.. from common import * from code39 import * from code128 import * from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas def run(): c = canvas.Canvas('barcodetest.pdf') c.drawString(50, 800, 'Code39') Standard39('Code39').drawOn(c,200,800) c.save() if __name__=='__main__': run()