[Zope] StructuredText to PDF

Alastair Burt burt@dfki.de
14 Jun 2001 13:09:22 +0200


Nils Kassube <nika@comunit.de> writes:

> Before I spend a lot of time to reinvent the wheel, well, has anyone
> here build a StructuredText to PDF converter with ReportLab?
> 
> I'd like to provide a string with a STNG document and get a sequence
> of flowable objects (Paragraphs, etc) back. Anyone? Please... :-) 

I do not have an interface between STX and Reportlab but I have managed to
generate PDF.  I used a ZWiki to get people generating content and
commenting on it. I then wrote an external method to extract the content in
HTML form, minus the comments, and feed this to htmltops[1] and
ps2pdf[2]. The resulting PDF is quite clean: the text is justified and
correctly hyphenated, tables and images are handled and there are bookmarks
for the headings.
 
I wondered if anyone had written a STX backend for LaTeX. Then you could
use the same kind of trick to go via Prosper [3] to get animated PDF
presentations from STX. Collaborative ZPowerPoint!

--- Alastair

Footnotes: 
[1]  http://www.tdb.uu.se/~jan/html2ps.html

[2]  This comes with ghostscript.

[3]  http://prosper.sourceforge.net/