.. title: rst2pdf progress report
.. slug: BB811
.. date: 2009/05/29 14:40
.. tags: open source, programming, python, rst2pdf
.. category:
.. link:
.. description:
.. type: text
.. author:
.. en:
.. priority:
.. updated: 2009/05/29 14:40
.. url_type:
Since the last release, there have been *many* changes, improvements and fixes in rst2pdf_.
.. _rst2pdf: http://rst2pdf.googlecode.com
At the bottom of this post you will find (maybe incomplete) list, but I wanted to share a couple of relatively large advances.
---------
**Presentations**
I have wanted to make rst2pdf useful for presentations for quite a while. And now it's getting close.
I am writing a small tutorial about it, but you can see a demo_ already.
The changes that make this possible are:
* Fixed bugs regarding page layout
* Added support for page backgrounds (including SVG!)
This was in large part because of `César Rodas`_, who wanted something simple and text-based to do his ZendCon presentation, so he asked me about it, and I was ashamed to give him a broken tool.
See how that works? I am driven by embarrassment. That's embarrasing.
---------
**Major stylesheet improvements**
The related changes are way too many (see below), but it also happened for a reason: I wanted to make prettier documents.
So, since most people seems to like Sphinx's style, I wanted to look similar.
Did I achieve it? Yes and no, take a look:
.. raw:: html
.. nothing
.. raw:: html
But it's just a draft, I didn't look at fonts, or weight of the headings, or even at what pygments color scheme sphinx is using.
But anyway, even `this rough stylesheet`_ made me find a dozen bugs or problems in rst2pdf.
So, the main lesson here is, please tell me what you can and can't do with rst2pdf, because there are whole areas I am not even looking at, day-to-day.
.. _this rough stylesheet: http://code.google.com/p/rst2pdf/source/browse/trunk/rst2pdf/styles/sphinx.json
.. _césar rodas: http://cesarodas.com/
.. _demo: //ralsina.me/static/slides.pdf
---------
The final thing is... the next release is going to be awesome. But then again, I always say that, don't I?
---------
**Changes as of today:**
* Workaround for issue 103 so you can use borderPadding as a list (but it will look wrong
if you are using wordaxe <= 0.3.2)
* Added fieldvalue style for field lists
* Added optionlist tstyle, for option lists
* Added collection of utility stylesheets and documented it
* Improved command line parsing and stylesheet loading (guess
extension like latest rst2latex does)
* Fixed Issue 67: completely new list layouting code
* Fixed Issue 116: crashes caused by huge images
* Better support for %width in images, n2ow it's % of the container frame's
width, not of the text area.
* Fixed bug in SVG scaling
* Better handling of missing images
* Added missing styles abstract, contents, dedication to the default stylesheet
* Tables style support spaceBefore and spaceAfter
* New topic-title style for topic titles (obvious ;-)
* Vertical alignment for inline images (:align: parameter)
* Issue 118: Support for :scale: in images and handle resizing of inline images
* Issue 119: Fix placement of headers and footers
* New background property for page templates (nice for presentations, for example)
* Default to px for image width specifications instead of pt
* Support all required measurement units ("em" "ex" "px" "in" "cm"
"mm" "pt" "pc" "%" "")
* New automated scripts to check test cases for "visual differences"
* Respect images DPI property a bit like rst2latex does.
* Issue 110: New --inline-footnotes option
* Tested with reportlab from SVN trunk
* Support for Dinu Gherman's svglib. If both svglib and uniconvertor are available,
svglib is preferred (for SVG, of course). Patch originally by rute.
* Issue 109: Separate styles for each kind of admonition
* For Issue 109: missing styles are not a fatal error
* Issue 117: TOCs with more than 6 levels now supported (raised limit to 9, which
is silly deep)