[reportlab-users] Newbie question: why the great chasm?

[Ka-Ping Yee]

I've only used ReportLab a little, but there's one big thing that
puzzles me about it.  (I'm sorry if this is a FAQ, though if it is,
perhaps it should be added to the FAQ page.  It does seem like the
sort of thing a lot of people would ask.)

Why the great chasm between pdfgen and graphics?

I don't understand why 'pdfgen' implements all these great drawing
routines (lines, curves, arcs, text, images, etc.) with a nice
general way to do linear transformations of anything, and then
the 'graphics' package implements everything all over again with a
different API, different names for all the drawing routines, and
a different way of applying transformations.

But there are chunks of functionality that are only available in
one of the two.  As far as I can tell so far from the documentation,
'graphics' can produce bitmap output, but 'pdfgen' can't.  'pdfgen'
can lay out and format text, but 'graphics' can't.  So it appears
there's no way to render a bitmap of formatted text.  Is that right?
To get that, do I have to rewrite Platypus using the drawing API
instead of the canvas API?

I'm sorry for complaining about this.  It just seems a shame that
you've put in all this effort (and duplicated effort) so that users
of ReportLab can have all of this fantastic power at their disposal,
but they can't have the union of all the features you've implemented.
It doesn't make sense to me as a programmer.  Is there a reason
behind this that I haven't considered?  Or perhaps I'm using the
toolkit in the wrong way?

Thanks,


-- ?!ng