Having a little fun with poppler, PyQt and rst2pdf

2009-09-19 14:49 | Also available in: Español

Inspired by a post by André Roberge 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:

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.

Cory / 2009-09-20 01:52:

This is impressive! I loved how easy it was to switch to 2-column.

How well does rst2pdf handle non-ascii text?

Roberto Alsina / 2009-09-20 11:43:

It's all supposed to be unicode all the way.

There have been some unicode problems with reportlab but I think they al have been worked around.

Paul Hildebrandt / 2009-09-20 16:32:

That was a fun demo. Thanks for posting it.

jjconti / 2009-09-20 20:47:

Excelente demo! pero... que paso con el alineado a la izquierda que no anduvo?

Roberto Alsina / 2009-09-20 21:23:

@jjconti:

Como ese era el unico titulo en el documento, era un "title". El estilo title define esto:

["title" , {
"parent": "heading",
"fontName": "stdBold",
"fontSize": "200%",
"alignment": "TA_CENTER",
"keepWithNext": false,
"spaceAfter": 10
}],

Por lo que si toco "heading", estas cosas no cambian.

btami / 2009-09-21 08:48:

Is it possible to put the code somewhere public?

Roberto Alsina / 2009-09-21 11:29:

Not yet, because I am using a piece of code for which I don't know the license.

As soon as that's cleared, I'll put it somewhere.

nsisodiya / 2011-03-09 04:56:

Please tell the location of code..

Roberto Alsina / 2011-03-09 12:54:

The interesting part about PDF viewing is here: http://code.google.com/p/rs...

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