[Tutor] xtopdf: an open source Python project to convert other file formats to PDF (original) (raw)
Aztech Guy aztech1200 at yahoo.com
Sat Jul 10 18🔞43 CEST 2004
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Hi list,
I recently started an open source Python project with the goal of providing ways to convert other file formats to PDF (Portable Document Format).
The URL of the project is:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/xtopdf
The xtopdf software has two prerequisites:
- Python (version 2.2 or later)
- The open source version of the ReportLab toolkit (version 1.16 or higher). Both are fairly small downloads. Of course, most people reading this list would already have installed Python :-)
Currently xtopdf can convert .DBF files and text files to PDF. It's not limited to only converting standalone text or DBF files. Because I've provided a mini-API for reading text, reading DBF metadata and data records, and writing them to PDF using ReportLab, you can use these API's (methods of classes) as is, or modify them, to do more complicated things with it. I've given a few examples of such stuff - one shows how to create PDF books in a simple format using the classes in xtopdf.
Posting the news to this list (Tutor) list because its a list for people wanting to learn about Python. I thought the code - which is a complete, working program - in fact several programs - could be of interest to Python beginners who would like to look at the source code of some complete working applications.
Also would welcome any comments on the software, either questions about why something was done in a certain way, or comments about improvement, or suggestions on adding new features.
The code is quite straightforward. It doesn't make much use of advanced features. File handling, dicts and lists are three language features used, apart from the ReportLab toolkit's APIs.
I've used ReportLab a little for this project and also in general and I can recommend it as worth checking out if you have a need (or interest) in generating PDF from Python programs. It's also written in Python.
HTH
Aztech.
"Winter brings penguins"
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