[reportlab-users] Large table cells

[Erik Stephens]

On Sep 9, 2004, at 1:37 AM, Bogdan M. Maryniuck wrote:

> First suggestion:
>   Fight as strongly as you can to fit one cell to the page.
> Decrease font, decrease padding, do table more wide or so. I even 
> split the
> table by columns just to fit at least one cell to the page. RL does 
> not support
> splitting one cell over the pages.

I've fought and fought, but I lost.  I'm working with dynamic text.


> Second suggestion:
>   Buy Pisa from Spirito.de :-) They support cell.../colspan
> and other goodness.

Being the self-centered American that I am ;-), I'm having a difficult 
time understanding what features they provide.  Babelfish is not 
treating me well.  Are you affiliated with them?  If so, please contact 
me directly so we can discuss.


> Third suggestion:
>   Throw away RL and use Java... (bad solution, btw).

Yeah, I never jumped on the Java bandwagon.  Maybe I was just too weak 
to jump high enough to make it there ;-)


> Fourth suggestion:
>   Pay for me or RL guys and we will develope it better.

Hmmm, I'm all for helping to "pay" for gnu or open source products.  I 
might be willing to fork over some USD's for such a feature.  Please 
contact me directly to make me an offer.  It would have to have 
Reportlab dev's blessing so it could make it into the official package. 
  I don't want to have to maintain patches through upgrades.

I've looked at Reportlab's Enterprise Publishing pricing?  25,000 USD 
is too steep for me right now.  If I could afford it, would it suffer 
similar problems?  If a Reportlab sales person reads this, feel free to 
contact me directly to discuss.

I've written quite a bit of code to handle parsing HTML and producing 
equivalent PDF.  I have to admit, I've cheated quite a bit since I can 
dictate what HTML it needs to handle.  It does handle the relevant CSS 
attributes and HTML tags to get me 90% of where I need to get.  I'm 
just stumbling over a few hurdles, namely large table cells and 
hyperlinks.  Therefore, I am hesitant to spend money.  On the other 
hand, I would like to help support this library.


Thanks for the response,
Erik