[Zope] Zope and PDF

[Steve Alexander]

Tom Cameron wrote:

> I have a need to create PDF files from a Zope application. I have been
> reading this thread on PDFs. I have no idea how to start creating pdf files.
> I have taken a look at reportlab and it looks all a bit too complex for what
> I want.
> 
> I just what to convert an HTML doc to a PDF doc. Sounds simple enough.


I'm pretty sure the commercial software Acrobat Distiller will do this.
Otherwise, if you want to truely own the solution, there's work involved.


> Anyway, could anybody give me some hints as to where I should start. A
> couple of URLS or how to links.


I suggest you join the ReportLab mailing list, and browse through the 
recent list archives.


People *are* doing this sort of thing. In fact, here's a recent email 
from the ReportLab list:

----

Frederico :

 >

> Hi! I need to place some text that comes from a database and it is 
> formatted as html (align, div, font size, li,ol,ul)
> 
> My question is: is there an easy way to put this in reportlab
> maintaining all the aspect? I'm using html parser (python) but 
> i'm tired of so much work, and beside i'm having trouble with 
> the font size...

Well, there's no free lunch. ;-) You must definitely do
the parsing yourself, but there should be enough code to
help you doing that in Python. You also need to write the 
mapping, no matter if you map it to Platypus directly or
to RML. The latter is certainly more convenient, but also
more expensive...

Answering this definitely is very difficult as it depends
very much on the real HTML you have... You may quickly 
find that you only get 80-90% of the job done really 
well, but the rest remains extremely difficult.

Regards,

Dinu

--
Dinu C. Gherman
----



http://reportlab.com

Go there now. ReportLab is good.

--
Steve Alexander
Software Engineer
Cat-Box limited