--- author: '' category: '' date: 2009/05/29 14:40 description: '' link: '' priority: '' slug: BB811 tags: open source, programming, python, rst2pdf title: rst2pdf progress report type: text updated: 2009/05/29 14:40 url_type: '' --- Since the last release, there have been *many* changes, improvements and fixes in rst2pdf_. .. _rst2pdf: http://rst2pdf.googlecode.com At the bottom of this post you will find (maybe incomplete) list, but I wanted to share a couple of relatively large advances. --------- **Presentations** I have wanted to make rst2pdf useful for presentations for quite a while. And now it's getting close. I am writing a small tutorial about it, but you can see a demo_ already. The changes that make this possible are: * Fixed bugs regarding page layout * Added support for page backgrounds (including SVG!) This was in large part because of `César Rodas`_, who wanted something simple and text-based to do his ZendCon presentation, so he asked me about it, and I was ashamed to give him a broken tool. See how that works? I am driven by embarrassment. That's embarrasing. --------- **Major stylesheet improvements** The related changes are way too many (see below), but it also happened for a reason: I wanted to make prettier documents. So, since most people seems to like Sphinx's style, I wanted to look similar. Did I achieve it? Yes and no, take a look: .. raw:: html

.. nothing .. raw:: html

But it's just a draft, I didn't look at fonts, or weight of the headings, or even at what pygments color scheme sphinx is using. But anyway, even `this rough stylesheet`_ made me find a dozen bugs or problems in rst2pdf. So, the main lesson here is, please tell me what you can and can't do with rst2pdf, because there are whole areas I am not even looking at, day-to-day. .. _this rough stylesheet: http://code.google.com/p/rst2pdf/source/browse/trunk/rst2pdf/styles/sphinx.json .. _césar rodas: http://cesarodas.com/ .. _demo: //ralsina.me/static/slides.pdf --------- The final thing is... the next release is going to be awesome. But then again, I always say that, don't I? --------- **Changes as of today:** * Workaround for issue 103 so you can use borderPadding as a list (but it will look wrong if you are using wordaxe <= 0.3.2) * Added fieldvalue style for field lists * Added optionlist tstyle, for option lists * Added collection of utility stylesheets and documented it * Improved command line parsing and stylesheet loading (guess extension like latest rst2latex does) * Fixed Issue 67: completely new list layouting code * Fixed Issue 116: crashes caused by huge images * Better support for %width in images, n2ow it's % of the container frame's width, not of the text area. * Fixed bug in SVG scaling * Better handling of missing images * Added missing styles abstract, contents, dedication to the default stylesheet * Tables style support spaceBefore and spaceAfter * New topic-title style for topic titles (obvious ;-) * Vertical alignment for inline images (:align: parameter) * Issue 118: Support for :scale: in images and handle resizing of inline images * Issue 119: Fix placement of headers and footers * New background property for page templates (nice for presentations, for example) * Default to px for image width specifications instead of pt * Support all required measurement units ("em" "ex" "px" "in" "cm" "mm" "pt" "pc" "%" "") * New automated scripts to check test cases for "visual differences" * Respect images DPI property a bit like rst2latex does. * Issue 110: New --inline-footnotes option * Tested with reportlab from SVN trunk * Support for Dinu Gherman's svglib. If both svglib and uniconvertor are available, svglib is preferred (for SVG, of course). Patch originally by rute. * Issue 109: Separate styles for each kind of admonition * For Issue 109: missing styles are not a fatal error * Issue 117: TOCs with more than 6 levels now supported (raised limit to 9, which is silly deep)