Since the last re­lease, there have been many changes, im­prove­ments and fix­es in rst2pdf.

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:

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.

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)