[reportlab-users] Combining reportlab's PDF and pypdf to partially create, partially copy?

[Yoann Roman]

> I was afraid people would say "It's not possible".  Rats.  I was 

> trying to get lazy, build up the table of contents programmatically, 

> and then just include each further section without any further ado.  

> I guess I'll have to build the whole document programmatically and 

> give up on pypdf.


We've used pyPdf to merge ReportLab's output with pre-existing PDFs 
without saving anything to disk by just using a StringIO buffer as a 
temporary destination for ReportLab's output. Taking your example:

class GetPDFPage(AllPages):

  def get(self):
    self.response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'application/pdf'

    outputPDF = PdfFileWriter()

    report_buffer = cStringIO.StringIO()
    p = Canvas(report_buffer)
    p.drawString(100, 750, "Hey, it's easy!.")
    p.save()

    pdfInput = PdfFileReader(cStringIO.StringIO(report_buffer.getvalue()))
    outputPDF.addPage(pdfInput.getPage(0))
    report_buffer.close()

    pdfList = glob.glob( '*.pdf')
    for chapPdf in pdfList:
      pdfInput = PdfFileReader(file(chapPdf, "rb"))
      for i in xrange(pdfInput.getNumPages()):
        outputPDF.addPage(pdfInput.getPage(i))

    outputPDF.write(self.response.out)

I haven't tested this, but that's the basic gist of what we do.

HTH,

-- 
Yoann Roman