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Is there a workaround to get floating divs in Report Lab?

I generate PDFs with the xhtml2pdf Python package. The output is not optimal. I use floating divs in order to place images and text on the page. In HTML this works but after PDF rendering, images and text ar placed underneath eachother which is not what I want. From surfing the web I learned that the Report Lab package that is used by xhtml2pdf can not handle floating divs. Does a workaround exist? I have tried webkit rendering via QT but the resulting PDFs are of low quality, i.e. character spacing is completely wrong.

If you cannot achieve the results you need with xhtml2pdf, I suggest you use ReportLab directly. ReportLab contains support for RML, ReportLabs own markup language that lets you easily create formatted text, and has a support library called Platypus that makes layout fairly simple using Python objects to represent document parts and page layouts.
The reason you are having problems, by the way, is that xhtml2pdf has to essentially act like a HTML rendering engine that outputs to PDF rather than the screen directly. As it took a long time and a lot of effort to make good rendering engines for browsers, so, too, does it seem that xhtml2pdf will take a lot of effort to make it of similar quality. This isn't to say that xhtml2pdf is bad, just that it's going to take time for it to be as good as rendering in a browser, and if PDF output for its own sake is what you really are interested in, I think using ReportLab directly is a better choice.

Insert png image programatically in pdf file at specific location

Looking for easiest way to do the following:
I have created 10,000 unique QR-codes, with unique filenames.
I have one postcard design (.ai, eps, pdf - doesn't matter) with place holder for the qr code and for a the unique filename (sans .png extension).
How would I go about inserting each of the 10.000 png's into 10,000 copies of the pdf files? (and I need to do the same with the unique filename /textstring that represents each QR code).
since I am really no good with programming it' doesn't matter which tools to use. As long as you hold my hand - or there is a link to a beginners documentation.
however:
I am trying to learn python - so that is preferred.
I work a little bit with R - but that will not be the easiest solution.
If this can be done directly from the terminal with a shell script then halliluja :-)
But really - if you know of a solution - then please post it, regardless of the tools.
Thanks in advance.

You can do it in Python using pyPdf to merge documents.
Basically, you create a PDF with your QRCode placed where you want it in the end.
You can use the (c)StringIO module to store the created PDF file in memory.
You can find pyPDF here; there's an example that shows how you would add a watermark to a file, you should be following the same logic.

Generating & Merging PDF Files in Python

I want to automatically generate booking confirmation PDF files in Python. Most of the content will be static (i.e. logos, booking terms, phone numbers), with a few dynamic bits (dates, costs, etc).
From the user side, the simplest way to do this would be to start with a PDF file with the static content, and then using python to just add the dynamic parts. Is this a simple process?
From doing a bit of search, it seems that I can use reportlab for creating content and pyPdf for merging PDF's together. Is this the best approach? Or is there a really funky way that I haven't come across yet?
Thanks!

From the user side, the simplest way to do this would be to start with a PDF file with the static content, and then using python to just add the dynamic parts. Is this a simple process?
Unfortunately no. There are several tools that are good at producing PDFs from scratch (most commonly for Python, ReportLab), but they don't generally load existing PDFs. You would have to include generating code for any boilerplate text, lines, blocks, shapes and images, rather than this being freely editable by the user.
On the other side there's pyPdf which can load PDFs, collate the pages, and extract some of the information, but can't really add new content. You can ‘merge’ pages into one, but you'd still have to create the extra information overlay as a page in ReportLab first.

Look into docutils and reSTructuredText. You could quickly write out your PDF document in reST and then compile the PDF using rst2pdf.py
I've used this, it creates very beautiful documents and the markup is extensible! Later you could take the same code and run it into rst2html to create a website out if it!
Take a look here:
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickref.html
http://code.google.com/p/rst2pdf/
Good luck

You could generate a document through, for example, TeX, or OpenOffice, or whatever gives you the most comfortable bindings and then print the document with a pdf printer.
This allows you not to have to figure out where to put fields precisely or figure out what to do if your content overflows the space allocated for it.

How to include page in PDF in PDF document in Python

I am using reportlab toolkit in Python to generate some reports in PDF format. I want to use some predefined parts of documents already published in PDF format to be included in generated PDF file. Is it possible (and how) to accomplish this in reportlab or in python library?
I know I can use some other tools like PDF Toolkit (pdftk) but I am looking for Python-based solution.

I'm currently using PyPDF to read, write, and combine existing PDF's and ReportLab to generate new content. Using the two package seemed to work better than any single package I was able to find.

If you want to place existing PDF pages in your Reportlab documents I recommend pdfrw. Unlike PageCatcher it is free.
I've used it for several projects where I need to add barcodes etc to existing documents and it works very well. There are a couple of examples on the project page of how to use it with Reportlab.
A couple of things to note though:
If the source PDF contains errors (due to the originating program following the PDF spec imperfectly for example), pdfrw may fail even though something like Adobe Reader has no apparent problems reading the PDF. pdfrw is currently not very fault tolerant.
Also, pdfrw works by being completely agnostic to the actual content of the PDF page you are placing. So for example, you wouldn't be able to use pdfrw inspect a page to see if it contains a certain string of text in the lower right-hand corner. However if you don't need to do anything like that you should be fine.

There is an add-on for ReportLab — PageCatcher.

What's a way to create flash animations with Python?

I'm having a set of Python scripts that process the photos. What I would like is to be able to create some kind of flash-presentation out of those images.
Is there any package or 'framework' that would help to do this?

I don't know of any Python-specific solutions but there are multiple tools to handle this:
You can create a flash file with dummy pictures which you then replace using mtasc, swfmill, SWF Tools or similar. This way means lots of trouble but allows you to create a dynamic flash file.
If you don't need dynamic content, though, you're better off creating a video with ffmpeg. It can create videos out of multiple images, so if you're somehow able to render the frames you want in the presentation, you could use ffmpeg to make a video out of it.
If you only want charts, use SWF Charts.
You could use external languages that have a library for creating flash files.
And finally there was another script language that could be compiled into several other languages, where swf waas one of the targets, but I can't remember its name right now.

You should generate a formated list with the data to your photos, path and what else you need in your presentation.
That data you load into a SWF, where your presentation happens.
Like that you can let python do what it does and flash what flash does best.
You might find allready made solutions for flash galleries / slideshows. http://airtightinteractive.com/simpleviewer/ is a famous one. You can load your custom xml in it.

Check out Ming, it seems to have Python bindings.

Ming is powerful but you might not find it pythonic to work with.
I prefer Haxe for Flash work. (It's the successor of MTASC)