[reportlab-users] PyQt Visual Editor

[Rajeev Joseph Sebastian]

Hello all,

After thinking a bit on the Visual editor, and the requirements of its core 
engine, I realised that one doesn't need pygtk/cairo or whatever to do this 
job: after all, we have a perfectly good graphics library ourselves - 
reportlab.graphics :)

So taking this further, in about 5 minutes, I was able to come up with this 
screenshot (attached).

It shows a PyQt window, rendering a couple of example taken from the Graphics 
guide.

I have also attached the code with this email. You can see, it is quite 
simple: a hallmark of the Qt library and especially PyQt. I couldn't say the 
same for any of the other GUI toolkits available for Python. So far, I have 
made commercial applications using wxPython, PyGTK and PyQt and I must say, 
PyQt is absolutely the best of the lot. 

There is also an issue of licensing: PyQt is available only under 2 licenses: 
GPL and a paid commercial license. But it is well worth it. PyQt is also 
available for a majority of OS, and as you may know, Qt's strengths is its 
graphics capabilities (as evidenced by the various customer success stories 
on Trolltech's website [1]).

I'm sure of the calm surprise and great relief you felt when you met Python 
and especially realised how fast it is to code with it. Two years after using 
wxPython, I got exactly the same feeling when I started with PyQt.

(Of course, I may be biased: I have a huge commercial database application 
written purely in PyQt, along with SQLObject, RL, my hacked version of trml 
(Tiny RML), etc. )

Also, it is possible to run this example on Windows [2].

(Btw, when running this application, I had to comment out line 80 of 
renderPM.py. I guess I don't have the fonts necessary to use this library. 
How can I get those fonts and where do I install it ?)

[1] http://www.trolltech.com/success/index.html
[2] http://www.quadgames.com/download/pythonqt/

-- 
Rajeev J Sebastian

Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

+1 416-410-3326
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