[reportlab-users] z3c.rml 0.5 released!

[Stephan Richter]

Hi everyone,

I am very proud to announce the release of z3c.rml version 0.5, an independent
implementation of the ReportLab Markup Language (RML). RML is a XML dialect
that describes the generation of a PDF using the ReportLab PDF generation
library.

This release focuses on compatibility with the RML version developed by
ReportLab, Inc. In the future, however, the plan is to divert from the
original API to fix inconsistencies between the RML Specification and the
ReportLab API and to extend beyond the original functionality.

Features
--------

- Full support of all common RML directives.

- Support for merging in pages from external PDF files thanks to pyPdf.

- Directives are fully documented using an extension to Zope's interfaces and
  schemas.

- Code-generated DTD file.

- Code-generated RML Reference document, of course as PDF built with z3c.rml.

- Optional integration of page templates, allowing dynamic RML documents to be
  created.

- Support for charts.

- Test suite with 90 files.


Roadmap to 1.0
--------------

- Fix inconsistencies between ReportLab and RML APIs.

- Finish the documentation of the chart support.

- Finish the page insert and merge functionality.

- Improve the DTD generator and possibly write a generator for RelaxNG.

- Integration of a hyphenation support, if a proper package can be found.


Installation
------------

z3c.rml has been uploaded to the Python cheese shop. Thus you should only need
to say:

  easy_install z3c.rml

Unfortunately, easy install will not install the ``reportlab`` dependency,
since it is not available in the cheese shop. This will have to be done by
hand.

Also, by default the pagetemplate support is not enabled, because of the many
dependencies. However, if you want the pagetemplate support, you can simply
install it or install the "zope.pagetemplate" egg.


Questions and Comments
----------------------

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact the Zope 3
Users mailing list at zope3-users at zope.org or E-mail me directly at
srichter at cosmos.phy.tufts.edu.

Enjoy!

Regards,
Stephan
-- 
Stephan Richter
CBU Physics & Chemistry (B.S.) / Tufts Physics (Ph.D. student)
Web2k - Web Software Design, Development and Training