I'm trying to develop a small script that generate a complete new pdf, mainly text and tables, file as result.
I'm searching for the best way to do it.
I've read about reportlab, which seems pretty good. It has only one drawback asfar as I can see. It is quiet hard to write a template without the commercial version, and the code seems to be hard to maintain.
So I've searched for a more sufficient way and found xhtml2pdf, but this software is quiet old, and cannot generate tables over two pages or more.
The last solution in my mind it to generate a tex-File with a template framework, and later call pdftex as subprocess.
I would implement the last one, and go over LateX. Would you do so, have you better ideas?
I would suggest using the LaTeX approach. It is cross-platform, works in many different languages and is easy to maintain. Plus it's non-commercial!
Pisa is a Html/CSS to PDF converter. It's a great tool for developing Pdf's from scratch using python.
If you need to just append Pdf Pages together, or search through Pdf data, then I'd suggest pyPdf it is free and pretty well documented and easy to use. You can download it here
You may check the http://pypi.python.org/pypi/z3c.rml/ package as an implemenation of Reportlab's RML.
"best way" means? What are you requirements? Some PDF requirements can be accomplished with "cheap" open-source generators or you may end up with some commercial PDF converter. Higher quality means higher price.
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Im starting a new project for personal porpuse!
Im working personally in finance, I decided to create personal chart viewing software to suit my needs. I thought I'd create a good part of the backend in Python as it is a language I know quite well. Use Javascript for the graphic side, and use a webview in a windows form to make everything available as if it were software.
As for the graphics I thought of using: Lightweight Library for JS, I find that today it is the most avant-garde library compared to the classic plotly, matplotlib.
Use pywebview as a bridge between Python and JS and to redirect everything in a windows form.
However I find it a bit difficult to use this library (pywebview), there is a poor documentation around and not very clear to me (my level of JS is really basic). However, I believe it is one of the most convenient solutions.
I would have thought of using pyscript, but it still seems early to use this library in production.
Questions:
Do you think such a job is feasible?
Do you know other libraries/better solutions to do such jobs?
What kind of approach would you use if you were to do such work?
What I am trying to achieve is to write most of the functions in python and use only JS to make calls through buttons or to get data from various inputs.
Wandering around the web I found a work already partially created by this guy (if you are reading, Thanks Filipe you have been very helpful! here you can see his project hosted on Github) but unfortunately it is difficult for me to get my hands on a code not produced by me.
I would like to have a script ran by cron or an anki background job that will automatically read in a file (e.g. csv, tsv) containing all my flashcards and update the flashcard database in anki automatically so that i don't have to manually import my flashcards 1000 times a week.
any have any ideas how this can be achieved ?
Some interesting links I've came across, including from answers, that might provide a lead towards solutions:
https://github.com/langfield/ki
https://github.com/patarapolw/ankisync
https://github.com/towercity/anki-cli
The most robust approach there is so far is to have your collection under git, and use Ki to make Anki behave like a remote repository, so it's very easy to synchronise. The only constraint is the format of your collection. Each card is kept as a single file, and there is no real way around this.
I'm the maintainer of ki, one of the tools you linked! I really appreciate the shout-out #BlackBeans.
It's hard to give you perfect advice without more details about your workflow, but it sounds to me like you've got the source-of-truth for your notes in tabular files, and you import these files into Anki when you've made edits or added new notes.
If this is the case, ki may be what you're looking for. As #BlackBeans mentioned, this tool allows you to convert Anki notes into markdown files, and more generally, handles moving your data from your collection to a git repository, and back.
Basically, if the reason why you've got stuff in tabular files is (1) because you want to version it, (2) because you want to use an external editor, or (3) because your content is generated programmatically, then you might gain some use from using ki.
Feel free to open an issue describing your use case in detail. I'd love to give you some support in figuring out a good workflow if you think it would be helpful. I am in need of more user feedback at the moment, so you'd be helping me out, too!
I'm trying to produce a post-dev "interface control document" for a not particularly well documented, smallish Python codebase. To fit into an in-place document schema it needs to be delivered as a flat Word document. It needs to be mostly extracted from the code.
So far my only candidate is doxygen's .rtf capability. And doxygen is sort of so-so with Python. And so-so with rtf. So. Can anyone suggest a better solution?
The python community is a strong supporter of the ReST format. I've grown to love it after having to deal with massive word documents. Sphinx is a great documentation tool that can be used document your projects, and is used by http://readthedocs.org, although it may be a little much to setup for a small project.
So I would recommend writing in ReST and seeing how it converts to word, via pandoc.
And really, pandoc supports converting the following formats to word and many other formats, so you have a lot of formats you can write documentation in if you want to avoid writing in word:
markdown
reStructuredText (ReST)
textile
HTML
DocBook
LaTeX
I am trying to learn Python and referencing the documentation for the standard Python library from the Python website, and I was wondering if this was really the only library and documentation I will need or is there more? I do not plan to program advanced 3d graphics or anything advanced at the moment.
Edit:
Thanks very much for the responses, they were very useful. My problem is where to start on a script I have been thinking of. I want to write a script that converts images into a web format but I am not completely sure where to begin. Thanks for any more help you can provide.
For the basics, yes, the standard Python library is probably all you'll need. But as you continue programming in Python, eventually you will need some other library for some task -- for instance, I recently needed to generate a tone at a specific, but differing, frequency for an application, and pyAudiere did the job just right.
A lot of the other libraries out there generate their documentation differently from the core Python style -- it's just visually different, the content is the same. Some only have docstrings, and you'll be best off reading them in a console, perhaps.
Regardless of how the other documentation is generated, get used to looking through the Python APIs to find the functions/classes/methods you need. When the time comes for you to use non-core libraries, you'll know what you want to do, but you'll have to find how to do it.
For the future, it wouldn't hurt to be familiar with C, either. There's a number of Python libraries that are actually just wrappers around C libraries, and the documentation for the Python libraries is just the same as the documentation for the C libraries. PyOpenGL comes to mind, but it's been a while since I've personally used it.
As others have said, it depends on what you're into. The package index at http://pypi.python.org/pypi/ has categories and summaries that are helpful in seeing what other libraries are available for different purposes. (Select "Browse packages" on the left to see the categories.)
One very common library, that should also fit your current needs, is the Python Image Library (PIL).
Note: the latest version is still in beta, and available only at Effbot site.
If you're just beginning, all you'll need to know is the stuff you can get from the Python website. Failing that a quick Google is the fastest way to get (most) Python answers these days.
As you develop your skills and become more advanced, you'll start looking for more exciting things to do, at which point you'll naturally start coming across other libraries (for example, pygame) that you can use for your more advanced projects.
It's very hard to answer this without knowing what you're planning on using Python for. I recommend Dive Into Python as a useful resource for learning Python.
In terms of popular third party frameworks, for web applications there's the Django framework and associated documentation, network stuff there's Twisted ... the list goes on. It really depends on what you're hoping to do!
Assuming that the standard library doesn't provide what we need and we don't have the time, or the knowledge, to implement the code we reuse 3rd party libraries.
This is a common attitude regardless of the programming language.
If there's a chance that someone else ever wanted to do what you want to do, there's a chance that someone created a library for it. A few minutes Googling something like "python image library" will find you what you need, or let you know that someone hasn't created a library for your purposes.
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I'm downloading Python 3.1.1 and that comes with the IDLE correct?
I'm also downloading QT for Windows which I'm told is a good GUI framework to work with Python.
What projects should I try to make in order to grasp some of the goodies Python brings to the table?
Thanks a bunch SO.
I highly recommend
http://www.diveintopython3.net
It assumes you already understand programming, and walks you through examples that demonstrate the unique abilities of Python.
Do the next project you intended to program with your prefered language with Python.
If you are new to python, why not start with some simpler command line projects? I know you said you are not new to development, but maybe you should spend some time with the core python stuff before tacking on a GUI framework. Just a suggestion.
Also, I would point out that Python 3+ code looks a bit different than a lot of the python 2.x code samples you will see around the internet. I have found Python 3 to be not the best in terms of backward compatibility. You might want to start out with a 2.x version of Python to get the most out of the plethora of Python tutorials on the internet, then move to Python 3 if you need it.
Write a simple Text Editor.
That was one of the projects i started when i first learned python. It gets you used to the GUI framework, file IO, many types, OOP, lots... It's something that you can grow over time as your confidence builds and it's cross platform so it's handy.
If python is your first dynamic lanugage you might want to play with some of it's dynamic aspects.
For example, using the getattr and setattr methods on objects, you could write a class that provides a fluent way of accessing elements from an XML document. Rather calling methods on an object with parameters like 'xml.getnode("a").getnode("b")' you could dynamically lookup the nodes as attributes and allow 'xml.a.b' instead. I thought this was very cool having come from static languages.
Note that this won't neccessarily give you a great feel for python in general (although you'll pick up the language as you go) but it will give you a taste of what is possible in dynamic languages.
PythonChallenge
Code Golf
Google Code Jam
These are good ways to practice learning Python.
Might I also suggest that you consider using a different IDE.
If you are interested in GUI programming, I would suggest looking into wxPython, PyWin32, easyGUI, TkInter (which is bundled with the Python distribution)
Python Challenge This is fun and interesting to learn Python programming.
While it is a matter of personal preference, I certainly wouldn't want to play around with a GUI framework when starting out -- I would want to get a feel for the language first by playing around with smaller snippets, such as those suggested on Code Golf. While getting your code to fit into the smallest number of bytes perhaps isn't the best way to learn good design, I think it's a good way to learn parts of the language. Certainly, just doing the tasks without necessarily trying to compact them down excessively could be helpful.
A project I wish someone would write: a friendly GUI that wraps around the scanner library and the PDF library, and lets the user easily scan and file documents.
It would have a toolbar with big buttons: "scan letter", "scan brochure", "scan photo". These would respectively choose high-resolution black-and-white, medium-resolution color, and high-resolution color.
The user would plop down the document and hit one of those buttons. Python would wake up the scanner and have it scan, and then would use Python Image Library or something to auto-detect the size of the actual scanned document and auto-crop down to minimal size.
For "scan photo" you would get a JPEG. For the others, you would get a PDF. And it would have an option where you could scan several pages and then select the scanned pages, and say "group" and it would make a single PDF out of them.
Other useful toolbar buttons would be: "Copy Letter", "Copy Brochure", "Copy Photo". These would scan and then immediately print on an appropriate output device (or just on the default output device for your first version).
If you want to go crazy, you could add an OCR function to try to recover searchable text from the scanned images, and put that in the PDF as tags or something.
Someday I will write this if nobody else does...