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

[Paul Sleigh]

Andy Robinson wrote:

> It occurs to me that perhaps a good, well-documented example of Approach 1

> might remove most of the needs for a "table of contents flowable" and

> multi-pass.


The TOC doesn't need to be "flowable" in the way that text in a 
paragraph is - we can assume that the text of a contents entry and the 
associate page number will fit happily on one line, so that's OK.  But 
it will be multi-page, and I won't know how many pages until I've read 
through the database once; I could do that for an optimisation, I 
suppose, and then only need to go back and fill in the page numbers.  So 
that's fine.


> You only really need multi-pass for references within a paragraph, where you

> don't know how wide the text string is going to be until later because you don't

> know yet if it's going to say 'page 9' or 'page 10'


Ideally, I want each page to have a centred footer with the text "Page X 
of Y" where Y is the total number of pages; obviously that will need to 
be filled in retroactively too.  So it looks like two passes: one to 
produce the numberless table of contents and the actual body of the 
document, and one to go back and fill in page numbers in the TOC and on 
every footer.

Sounds doable, I think, based on what you've said.  Excellent!  Goodbye, 
Rasmus, hello Guido!


: P :