[reportlab-users] How-to for adding new features?

[Andy Robinson]

2009/7/20 Dinu Gherman <gherman at darwin.in-berlin.de>:

> Hi,

>

> I'm thinking about new features for ReportLab, one of them being

> PDF/A compliance. AFAIK, this is not a given. So, is there any-

> thing like a document describing "officially" how to add such

> features in a "canonical" way to the pdfgen module or to any

> part of the library at all? At least I cannot remember having

> seen that in the existing documentation produced over the last

> nine years, but maybe I'm wrong.



No such document exists.  My excuse is here ;-)

    http://agilemanifesto.org/

We're also starting work on a bunch of extensions ourselves in August,
and this has been on our wish list too.    We hope to be adding
support for colour models and/or palettes  (e.g. "this document is
CMYK, so complain if someone loads in an RGB image by mistake...", or
"this document has an explicit colour palette, complain if they go
outside it...).   There are some similarities.

In my opinion, when you initialise a canvas, you should be able to say
things like
  c = Canvas(....pdf_version="PDF/A"..)
and it should make sure that version (flavour? format?) is respected.
In the case of PDF/A, this would have to NOT load the standard fonts,
unless the files were present for embedding.

I guess in Platypus one could initialise things on the DocTemplate and
pass down to the canvas.

We have not yet started the detailed work on this but would welcome
peoples' thoughts.

One of the big gaps is finding a free compliance-checking tool.   We
can use Acrobat Professional's preflight tools for some things...


- Andy