[reportlab-users] Re: Newbie - platypus or not?

[Andres Luga]

Tim Roberts wrote:
[many helpful suggestions]

To practice my Python skills (I'm Python newbie also) I ended up
writing a class that gets a list of objects and draws on the canvas.
For name-fitting I wrote a for-loop that tries smaller font sizes with
step 0.1. All-in-all about 160 lines of code.

You are right that there should be only one "Name" field, that way the
users don't get confused when someone insists on having a suffix ;)

Andy Robinson wrote:
> implementing the name as a centered paragraph
You are right. I used the paragraph for the text below name (position
of the person - can be long; also for some higher-ups the background
has to be green to emphasise their being high and up ;)) and I should
use it for the name also.


These are passage/security badges for a port - the territory is quite
big and there are a number of other firms within the territory.
Currently these are done manually in OpenOffice and we've issued
nearly 300 thus far. Now, when the system is in place, I'm trying to
automate and quicken the process - in 2 years there will be about 3000
badges. As the badges expire in 2 years, these have to be reissued
etc.

At first I tried to automate OpenOffice, because I thought that the
possibility of fine-adjusting before printing would be useful. But OO
uses Python 2.3 even in development version, and the user app was
started with Python 2.4 and gave errors under 2.3. I even tried to
recompile OO to use Python 2.4, but under Windows, apparently, it is
not something one can achieve in couple of days starting from scratch
without MS compiler...

After these kind of issues using Reportlab felt like a vacation :) -
one long day and 150 pdf-files later the pdf-generation is in place
and I can move on with the actual app.

Thank you for responding, it was really helpful!

Regards,

Andres