[Zope] Using ReportLab with Zope

[Robin Becker]

In article <000001bfc278$7c017e80$1002a8c0@ente.riverside.uk.net>,
Richard Folwell <richard@folwell.com> writes

On the reportlab site we have several pages which can be viewed as PDF.
The PDF & HTML versions are generated in parallel from a common source
by a python script.

I guess you can get a pythonmethod to run over your existing documents
and produce PDF versions provided you can parse the DTML or some major
subset of it. You would also need to add the generated PDF document into
the ZODB database and modify the DTML to contain a reference to the
generated PDF.

ReportLab doesn't use Zope , but I have some experience with it.

>To sound out what, if anything, other people are doing in this area:
>
>I am interested in using ReportLab with Zope, to provide an improved printed 
>version of
>web-published documents.  What I want to do is fairly straightforward, to create 
>a PDF file with:
>
> - a title/cover page with control information
> - a table of contents
> - the body of the document, with a technical document style header and footer 
>(title, docref,
>revision, date, page x of numpages, etc)
>
>Indexing would be nice, but that involves much more complexity and is outside 
>the scope of what I
>need right now.
>
>Currently I have documents published from Zope, sourced either as HTML (DTML 
>documents) or XML, with
>the intention to also produce documents whose content will come mostly from a 
>database (clearly
>straightforward in Zope).
>
>I think what I need to do is find some way of re-directing the output from Zope 
>(what would normally
>go to the browser) to an external program, which uses ReportLab to generate the 
>PDF file from the
>HTML stream, and returns the location of the file to Zope to pass to the browser 
>as a re-direct (so
>the browser gives the user the option to view or download the PDF file).
>
>Is this correct?  Is anyone already working in this direction?  Any hints or 
>tips?
>
>Richard
>
>
>
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-- 
Robin Becker