[reportlab-users] Reportlab under Zope 3

[Andy Robinson]

> Probably I'm one of those, then! At least sometimes. ;-)

>

> As Marco said, you can do some interesting stuff using pyPDF.


I'm very glad to see pyPDF is filling this gap for people - and it seems to
have matured since I last looked.

Assertions about your PDF are very important.  Another handy trick
is to draw various invisible markers as you create the documents - you
can easily draw off the page.  If you put in known easy-to-parse strings like
     "XXX: Statement for Client 1234 :XXX"
when drawing and use extractText later on, you can use a simple regex to
verify the correct structure of complex document processes.

Just be warned that generating and parsing PDF files is a little heavier than
most other unit tests and may take longer.  I tend to apply a bunch of
assertions
at once about a few documents, rather than 20 separate unit tests all creating
and parsing their own PDFs.

- Andy