[reportlab-users] ParagraphAndImage flowable

[Matt Page-Lieberman]

I found one of the answers to our problem.  In version 2.0 of ReportLab, 
indeed an argument is passed to say in which order the image and 
paragraph should be displayed.  One outstanding question though, is how 
to indent the whole unit rather than just indenting the text or having 
to hack the implementation as explained below (applying the paragraph 
style's leftIndent property to the indentation of the image.

Matt Page-Lieberman wrote:

>
> Hi, we're working on a project and we would like to have an icon 
> followed immediatly by text.  One solution that we found was to use 
> the ParagraphAndImage flowable (PAIf).  The problem is that the PAIf 
> hard codes the decision that the paragraph will appear before the 
> image and there are no arguments that can be passed to the PAIf to 
> change this behavior.  Additionally, the image has no associated 
> style; only the paragraph does.  So, when we want to have an indented 
> PAIf where the image is immediately followed by text, we have to 
> resort to a variety of hacks of the PAIf by using the paragraph 
> style's leftIndent to indent the image within the implementation of 
> PAI.draw().
>
> Thus, we have created a new flowable named ImageAndParagraph (IAP) 
> which differs from PAI only in the implementation of IAP.draw().  
> Ideally, there would be one flowable - PAI - where an argument (which 
> would of course have a default) would specify which object (Image or 
> Paragraph) to put first, and which, unfortunately, would probably 
> result in an ugly if-else in draw().  Another option in order to take 
> advantage of shared code would to have a paragraph and image type be 
> abstract with both PAI and IAP each implementing draw() as necessary.
>
> Unfortunately, as it now stands, it looks like our temporary solution 
> would be to either inherit IAP from PAI and override draw() so that we 
> can take advantage of the implmentations for wrap(), split(), etc - 
> (This is one sad hack though since an IAP should not descend from a 
> PAI) - or to copy and paste all the implementation of PAI to our new 
> class IAP which is being used as the current solution.  But, this 
> would cause us to not be able to rely on any new implementations of 
> PAI if the code were to be changed in the future; we would have to 
> verify for differences with every release and since we have very 
> little control of which versions of reportlab will be packaged/used 
> with our program in the future, this is quite the dilemma.
>
> Are there any other suggestions or possibilities to chage this class 
> hierarchy in the future.  I'm sure that the team that I work on would 
> be able to arrange a change to this hierarchy if warranted.
>
> Would the new type ImageAndFlowables be able to address any of these 
> issues?
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Matt Page-Lieberman
>
> Specifications:
> Library version: reportlab-1.20
> O.S.: Librix (Gentoo)
>
> _______________________________________________
> reportlab-users mailing list
> reportlab-users at reportlab.com
> http://two.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/reportlab-users