[reportlab-users] PyQt Visual Editor

[Andy Robinson]

Rajeev Joseph Sebastian wrote:
> 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 :)


Yes, this is fine for display.  We use libart under the hood, like
many others.  And the next major version (some time in 3008?) would
basically break the distinction between drawings and pages to use
this to render.

But one also wants to be able to grab and select objects, detect what's
under the mouse and so on.  I don't think th 'hit detection' is a big
addition, but it probably does involve a new version, as we'd have to
move to everything being objects.  And then we'd gradually move into all 
the editing/drawing features which Skencil does really well already.
Who would not want snap-to-grid etc.?

Personally I love Delphi for GUIs - always build, always run, next to no
dependencies, and embed Python easily as the 'model'.  But if we did it
right, the model and controller part of any GUI would be fairly portable.

> (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 ?)
The fonts were in all the Acrobat Reader 3. and 4.0 distros, then they 
stopped bundling them.  We don't feel comfortable redistributing Adobe's
fonts, even the 'standard 14', but you can install an old copy of 
acroread or copy the fonts from it yourself if you wish.

I just discovered XPDF ships some similar fonts out of the Ghostscript
distro which are GPL.  Since we'd be using the fonts, not reprogramming 
them, I think we should grab these and check them into reportlab/fonts
so that we always had them available.  It would save people a lot of 
trouble.

Best Regards,


Andy Robinson