[Grok-dev] Might interest someone: client-server-pdf-creation-with-xtopdf

[Sebastian Ware]

This was on the Reportlab mailing list, and I thought it might  
interest someone. Maybe even to package this for Grok.

Mvh Sebastian

On Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 1:19 PM, Vasudev Ram <vasudevram at gmail.com>  
wrote:
>
> Hi list,
>
> I'm happy to announce the release of v1.0 of PDFXMLRPC, a client- 
> server
> application that lets users create PDF content from text, over the  
> Internet
> or their intranet, using Reportlab, xtopdf, XML-RPC and Python.
>
> Usage example for PDFXMLRPC:
>
> You can run the server on one computer which is connected to the  
> Internet.
> You can run the client on another computer which is connected to the
> Internet.
>
> When you run the client, it sends text content to the server. The  
> server
> then converts this text to PDF, and sends that PDF content back to the
> client over the Internet. The client then writes that PDF content to  
> a local
> PDF file, which the user can then open / print / etc.
> (But also see the part about callability (i.e., programmability) of  
> both the
> client and server below.)
>
> The announcement of PDFXMLRPC is here on my blog:
>
> http://jugad2.blogspot.com/2009/10/client-server-pdf-creation-with-xtopdf.html
>
> That blog post has a link to a zip file that you can download, which
> contains the PDFXMLRPC package.
>
> The zip file contains the following files:
>
> - PDFXMLRPCServer.py - the server
> - PDFXMLRPCClient.py - the client
> - README.txt - documentation of the prerequisites needed (*), the  
> links to
> get them from, the steps to install PDFXMLRPC, and steps to run it  
> (the
> server and the client).
> - License.txt - the license file (PDFXMLRPC is released under the BSD
> License)
> (*) The prerequisites are:
>
> - xtopdf v1.0, Reportlab v1.x and Python 2.x or higher for the server
>
> -  Python 2.x or higher for the client
>
> (XML-RPC is required for both the client and the server, but since  
> it is
> included in the standard Python library, I don't treat it as a  
> separate
> prerequisite).
>
> Although both the server and the client programs contain main()  
> functions,
> and therefore both can be run as standalone programs, they are also  
> both
> callable. There is one "top-level" class in each of the server and the
> client - PDFXMLRPCServer and PDFXMLRPCClient respectively.
>
> The main functions in the server and client, act as examples of how  
> to call
> those classes.
>
> Since the classes are callable, you can incorporate the  
> functionality of the
> server and the client, into your own larger programs, to get the
> functionality of client/server PDF creation over the Net, in your own
> applications.
>
> I welcome any feedback on this software.
>
> Finally, thanks a lot to the Reportlab team and all the users who've  
> helped
> improve it, for their work.
>