[reportlab-users] PyOOTools - Process OpenOffice.org Writer Files and transform them to PDF using the ReportlabToolkit

[Martin_Simon]

> It looks very promising, although the spacing around the individual
> "flowables" seems to still differ between the results of the Open-
> Office PDF-export function and the RL-based one. 

PyOOTools is not intended to be a WYSIWG tool - use the builtin 
OpenOffice PDF Export to get exact printouts of an sxw-file. Consider it 
as something like a "poor man's LATEX", especially for server-side use, 
with OO.org as editor and template generator. First of all it is 
designed to avoid the installation of OpenOffice with UNO, XSL-FO 
Processors, LATEX or something like this on a server. Possible 
applications could be:
* view archives of SXW-Files on a server, without installing OpenOffice 
on the client
* produce serial letters in sxw-format on a server and send them to a 
client that has OpenOffice installed (it has an sxw to sxw option!)
* automatic generated PDF invoices with the sign of your company on it, 
in a simple design. The template was written by your secretary who can 
work with OpenOffice, but does not know about Python or XML-Style 
Languages like RML.
* generate PDF reports from database queries and use OpenOffice to 
design the template
* ........

The spacing between text lines is only hardcoded so far: leading = 120% 
of font-size. This can be modified.

> Also, I can see
> issues with hyphenation, like blanks used in your output for "in-
> ternal" hyphens... 

I'll try to fix this.

> Unfortunately, I cannot perform a longer list of tests, but so far
> it looks very promising as I said. I hope you will continue develop-
> ing your tool and would suggest a name which better indicates what
> it does, since "OO Tools" is easily confused with "object-oriented
> tools" by many people. 

I will think of it. How about "PySxwTools"?

Martin