[reportlab-users] Producing pages out of order - possible?

[Robin Becker]

Paul Sleigh wrote:

> G'day.  I've got a project I wrote in PHP using an open source PDF 

> generation library, but it's slow and a huge memory hog, and I'm hoping 

> to move it over to something a little less ugly.  One feature I need is 

> the ability to produce pages out of order: that is, generate the body of 

> a document as pages N+1 to N+M, then an N-page table of contents at the 

> beginning, with the page numbers in the form "Page 1 of X" filled in as 

> the last step.  The table of contents has to be at the start if at all 

> possible because that's what the user had with his original 

> Word-macro-chewing-gum-and-string version, and he's resistant to change, 

> but obviously it has to have that generated after the body of the 

> document because otherwise there's no way to know which item goes on 

> which page.

> 

> So, my question: can I do this using the ReportLab tool?  If so, I think 

> you've found a lifelong friend; if not, I fear I may have to come up 

> with some other solution, and I'm running out of ideas.

> 

> What can you tell me?

> 

> : Paul :


Well there is a table of contents example which dinu was playing with recently, 
but I don't know if the TOC is multipage. The platypus layout stuff does support 
some kind of multi-pass approach as well, but I'm not terribly familiar with the 
multi-pass aspects.
-- 
Robin Becker