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

[Andy Robinson]

> Regarding the docs -- imho, PDF printing is what brings users to ReportLab,
> Platypus is what will convince them to stay, and (you hope!) RML is what will
> convince them to give you money :D  Perhaps shortchanging the Platypus
> documents is shortchanging a vital step along the way?

If we could find the time, we would really love to document it better. 
But our team is always under great project pressure; it's not a 
conspiracy!

There is in fact almost zero progression from user group to commercial 
and we're generally not trying to get money out of the Python community 
or user group.   RML and associated tools are part of enterprise 
solutions in the 50-100k range where we are selling our ability to do 
data-to-PDF solutions to eBusiness managers.  Delivering those kinds of 
projects is the day-job; it drives new features in RML, which in turn 
requires new flowables in Platypus, but always under deadlines, and two 
steps away from getting it documented.

The only feasible solution I can see is to make documentation more of a 
community process.  You've taken a big step forwards, but we can 
reinforce it with, say, a wiki that will let people add recipes and 
snippets with minimal effort; and better use of things like epydoc and 
docstrings to evolve a documented API that makes classes discoverable. 
     The main focus of the 2.x series, once out, should be to gradually 
improve usability/docs/examples without breaking anything.  That might 
well including looking again at how we publish the docs.


I'm turning in now - thanks again and have a good weekend!

Best Regards,


Andy Robinson