[reportlab-users] Bulleted Text not displaying

[Andy Robinson]

2008/10/18 Peter Mattingly <pmattingly at mail.csuchico.edu>:

> Vertical space between paragraphs?


That's the one.  But you're the first person who has ever questioned
this one.  While I accept that we do not have a clear explanation of
"how to make documents with Platypus",



> I'm currently a student learning how to do more with Report Labs, I'm not

> experienced enough with your conventions to create clean portable code.  But

> at the same time, I'm able to revise and elucidate a section of the user

> manual with perfect clarity and a few minutes time.


Peter, you just haven't looked at the manual source.
The relevant source code look like this:

---trunk/src/docs/userguide/ch5_paragraphs.py  line 87 ----

disc("""The two attributes $spaceBefore$ and $spaceAfter$ do what they
say, except at the top or bottom of a frame. At the top of a frame,
$spaceBefore$ is ignored, and at the bottom, $spaceAfter$ is ignored.
This means that you could specify that a 'Heading2' style had two
inches of space before when it occurs in mid-page, but will not
get acres of whitespace at the top of a page.  These two attributes
should be thought of as 'requests' to the Frame and are not part
of the space occupied by the Paragraph itself.""")

-----------------------------------------
I know it's weird but Roberto's RST2PDF didn't exist in 2000 when we
reached our "version 1" criterion of being able to create our own manual.
But it is NOT hard to suggest a concrete amendment, or open one of the
scripts and rewrite a few paragraphs; and you can check it isn't broken and
regenerate your own userguide in 2 seconds flat.

--

Moving forwards, I hope we'll end up with the documentation properly versioned
in ReST, and be able to make both HTML docs on the site and PDF via our own
libraries and (probably) RST2PDF.  Once we can publish them to HTML, it will
be fairly easy to allow 'comment this page' functionality like the
Django folks did.
A 'snippets' site would be really cool too, as long as people could
add screenshots
or output samples.  But all this takes time.

The critical factor is still time.  We make NO money from our open source code,
and even if we got 100x more users, we would still make no money.  Therefore
we can't put large amounts of senior staff time into updating our open source
docs.  We can, however, quickly accept specific revisions or
contributions, however
worded or submitted. You don't have take the word "patch" too
literally - if someone sent in a text file
attempting to explain Platypus a bit better, or a specific list of
corrections, we'd
happily check it in.

Best Regards,


Andy