My journey began after reading a long report on network statistics that one of my co-workers was required to write.
I have always been enthusiastic about not writing reports but generating them, and as much as I love manual typesetting some documents are just to vast and to complicated to manually typeset every paragraph to make sure it looks just right.
The document we will be generating needs to pull loads of data from Intrusion Prevention/Detection and other network devices we will then be manipulating the data calculating some more graphing some of it then putting it all into tables. I’ve always wanted a project to do in ReportLab. I began looking into ReportLab and officially they offer 2 versions; ReportLab Plus and ReportLab OpenSource. Unfortunately ReportLab OpenSource does not support the ReportLab Markup Language(RML) which is in essence is an XML dialect. The licence for ReportLab plus was a but out of my price range so I went searching and came up with https://pypi.python.org/pypi/z3c.rml an RML parser that comes with an rml2pdf function. But first I had to get z3c.rml and opensource ReportLab installed onto my MacBook.
I kept getting this error;
clang: error: unknown argument
I found the solution here http://bruteforce.gr/bypassing-clang-error-unknown-argument.html where you can suppress the error by prefixing your pip install command with the following
ARCHFLAGS=-Wno-error=unused-command-line-argument-hard-error-in-future pip install
This seemed to work and I was finally able to import reportlab z3c.rml and all the other dependancies.
I started off with a file simply importing the modules and calling rml2pdf.go but this evolved a bit as I incorporated templating so I came up with this .py file to read in an XML file apply mako rendering then create an RML file which I render to PDF like so.
import z3c.rml.tests
from z3c.rml import rml2pdf, attr
from mako.template import Template
mytemplate = Template(filename='btest.xml')
figures=[
#(number,name,x-size,y-size,)
]
f=open("btest.rml","w")
f.write(mytemplate.render(figures=figures))
f.close()
rml2pdf.go("btest.rml", "test.pdf")
I then proceeded to build up my sample document.
which you can find on bitbucket here https://bitbucket.org/alec_langford/rml-bits
where I set a border imported some images put in headers, footers and page numbers.
So hopefully this will be the way we typeset future reports and I won’t need to spend a whole bunch of time fixing badly processed word documents.