Hi, I'm giving below, steps to install and use my xtopdf PDF creation/conversion toolkit.
This post is for end-users. xtopdf is both a set of end-user tools and a library for use by developers, to create PDF from various input formats. I'll post another message here about how developers can use it in various ways, sometime later. The steps are for the Windows platform. Will do another post for Linux. 1. Get Python v2.4.3 here: http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.4.3/python-2.4.3.msi Size is not more than 10 MB. Install it - its an MSI, so just double-click. (Any Python version >= 2.2 will work for xtopdf). 2. Get Reportlab open source version 1.21 here: http://www.reportlab.org/ftp/ReportLab_1_21.tgz Size is not more than 3 MB. (Don't use ReportLab 2.0 although it is available. I've not yet tested xtopdf with it. ReportLab 1.21 is the latest stable version in the version 1 series.) Install it following the instructions in the README file. It should be straightforward. The main points to take care of are: 2.1 First, before installing ReportLab, run Python once (you may have to add the dir. where Python got installed, say C:\Python24, to your PATH variable first). Once that dir. is added to your PATH (preferably via Control Panel), open a DOS prompt. At this prompt, type: python This should start the Python interpreter. You will get a one or two line message with the Python version, and then the Python interpreter prompt. 2.2. At this prompt, type the following two lines: import sys print sys.path This should display a list of all the dirs. that are in the Python PATH - an internal Python variable that gets set automatically, upon startup of the interpreter, to a set of default dirs. This variable is analogous to the DOS PATH variable. In this list of dirs., look for "C:\Python24\lib\site-packages" as one of the dirs. It should be there by default. If it is there, then exit the Python interpreter by typing Ctrl-Z and Enter. 3. Now install Reportlab: Unzip the ReportLab_1_21.tgz file with WinZip, into some folder, say c:\reportlab. This will create a folder called either: a) reportlab_1.21 with a folder called reportlab under it or b) just a folder called reportlab. If a), then move the reportlab folder (which is under reportlab_1.21) to under C:\Python24\Lib\site-packages . If b), then move the reportlab folder to under C:\Python24\Lib\site-packages. The above steps should make ReportLab work. An alternative way is to just unzip the reportlab .tgz file into some folder, say, C:\RL, and then create a file called, say, reportlab.pth, which contains just one line - the path to this folder where the extracted contents get stored.e.g. C:\RL\reportlab . Please check that step out (in the ReportLab .tgz file's README file for the exact details). 4. After the above steps, to check that Reportlab works, go to a DOS prompt again, run python again as before, and then at the Python prompt, enter either or both of the following commands (on separate lines): import reportlab from reportlab import pdfgen If either or both of these above commands work (and if there is no error message), it means that Reportlab is properly installed. 5. Now you can install xtopdf. Get xtopdf here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/xtopdf (click on the green rectangle which says "Download Conversion of other formats to PDF". After downloading the file, unzip it into a folder, say c:\temp. This will create a folder called xtopdf-1.0 under C:\temp. Go to that folder. There are many Python programs here with extension .py. To run, e.g., WritePDF.py, do this: python WritePDF.py some_file.txt This will run it and the output will be a file called some_file.pdf. Try opening it in Adobe Reader. Similarly try running some more programs: python DBFReader.py test1.dbf (or test2.dbf or test3.dbf or test4.dbf - all of which are in the package) This should read the DBF file and display its metadata (file header and field headers) and data records to standard output - the screen. python DBFToPDF.py test1.dbf test1.pdf This should do the same as the above (DBFReader.py), except that instead of the output going to the screen, it will go to a file called test1.pdf. And so on, try out a few others. Most of all of the programs can be run as "python prog_name.py". Some require one or more command-line arguments (all of them require at least one command-line argument, at least an input file). Some of them give usage messages if you run them without any command-line arguments, but this is not necessarily the case for all of them, nor are the messages always user-friendly enough - I'm working on fixing that in the next release. (Developers who have at least a working knowledge of Python should be easily able to figure out the usage, though, just by reading the start of the main() function for each program - the part where the code checks the command-line arguments.) But you should be able to run at least a few of them like this. Be sure to try running this one also: python PDFBook.py book1.pdf book1.txt This one reads a list of chapter file names (where each chapter is one .txt file) and corresponding chapter titles, from the 2nd argument book1.txt, and creates a PDF e-book out of all the chapters combined, using the chapter title as the heading for each page. This is a very quick and simple way of creating simple PDF e-books from a set of chapters, one chapter per text file. Post a message here if you encounter any problems. HTH Vasudev --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Vasudev Ram Software training and consulting Custom utility development http://www.dancingbison.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
