---
author: ''
category: ''
date: 2009/09/19 14:49
description: ''
link: ''
priority: ''
slug: BB830
tags: programming, pyqt, python, qt, rst2pdf
title: Having a little fun with poppler, PyQt and rst2pdf
type: text
updated: 2009/09/19 14:49
url_type: ''
---
Inspired by `a post by André Roberge <http://aroberge.blogspot.com/2009/09/live-preview-of-restructuredtext-to.html>`_ I wanted to see if rst2pdf was too slow to be used for real-time previews in a restructured text editor.

It would also be very useful, for example, as a way to test stylesheet changes, making rst2pdf much more useful in general.

And after a couple of hours of gentle hacking, you know... it doesn't suck **at all**. I implemented the (still very primitive) PDF viewer using a python/poppler/Qt binding I found via google, the UI is PyQt.

Here's the video:

.. raw:: html

   <div class="flickr">
   <object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/CrKFq_ucOE0&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/CrKFq_ucOE0&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
    </div>

A note: the video was recorded using qt-recordmydesktop and that program is awesome. It was **trivial** to do.

I expect this will not be good enough when long documents are processed, but the rst2pdf manual (about 25 pages) renders in 5 seconds.