[reportlab-users] Looking for a How-to to get me moving quickly

[Andy Robinson]

Benn wrote:
> Hey All,
> 
> As it just so happens, I just finished a fairly brief look at getting started
> with ReportLab, at:
> 
>    http://www.magitech.org/2006/05/05/getting-started-with-reportlab/
> 
> I'd tremendously appreciate any feedback, comments, or suggestions people
> might have!
> -G

Benn, this is great - many thanks indeed for writing this!  I'll link to 
it from our own site on the next update.

It's particularly useful for those of us inside ReportLab to get 
feedback on how others see the library at the beginning, and will 
encourage us to fill a few gaps too.  I think I'll tweak the test runner 
right away.

One thing I might suggest adding (and I am adding to our own docs) is a 
brief reference to the Report Markup Language manual and tests....

   http://www.reportlab.com/docs/RML_UserGuide_1_0.pdf
   http://developer.reportlab.com/examples.html

The reason our documentation on PLATYPUS is so patchy is that it's the 
engine for a commercial markup language which has a spec (DTD), much 
better documentation, and test cases written to be read by humans.  When 
time gets tight, RML gets documented and Platypus often doesn't.  In 
most cases there is a VERY close correspondence between RML tags and the 
corresponding classes and attributes, and it's way easier to really 
understand Platypus by skimming the RML examples.   Most of our brains 
are tuned to read markup languages by now anyway...

Keep up the great work, and we'll keep listening and maybe even pitch in 
some content ourselves...

- Andy Robinson