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Asked: 2026-05-10T23:41:38+00:00

I am using Python to read in data in a user-unfriendly format and transform

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I am using Python to read in data in a user-unfriendly format and transform it into an easier-to-read format. The records I am outputting are usually going to be just a last name, first name, and room code. I

I would like to output a series of pages, each containing a contiguous subset of the total records, divided into multiple columns, each of which contains a contiguous subset of the total records on the page. (So in other words, you’d read down the first column, move to the next column, move to the next column, etc., and then start over on the next page…)

The problem I am facing now is that for output formats, I’m almost certainly limited to HTML (and Javascript, CSS, etc.) What is the best way to get the data into this columnar format? If I knew for certain that the printable area of the paper would hold 20 records vertically and five horizontally, for instance, I could easily print tables of 5×20, but I don’t know if there’s a way to indicate a page break — and I don’t know if there’s any way to calculate programmatically how many records will fit on the page.

How would you approach this?

EDIT: The reason I said that I was limited in output: I have to produce the file on one computer, then bring it to a different computer upon which we cannot install new software and on which the selection of existing software is not optimal. The file itself is only going to be used to make a physical printout (which is what the end users will actually work with), but my time on the computer that I can print from is going to be limited, so I need to have the file all ready to go and print right away without a lot of tweaking.

Right now I’ve managed to find a word processor that I can use on the target machine, so I’m going to see if I can target a format that the word processor uses.

EDIT: Once I knew there was a word processor I could use, I made a simple skeleton file with the settings that I wanted (column and tab settings, monospaced font in a small point size, etc.) and then measured how many characters I got per line of a column and how many lines I got per column. I’ve watched the runs pretty carefully to make sure that there weren’t some strange lines that somehow overflowed the characters-per-line guideline (which shouldn’t happen with monospaced font, of course, but how many times do you end up having to figure out why that thing that ‘shouldn’t’ happen is happening anyways?)

If there hadn’t been a word processor on the target machine that I could use, I probably would have looked at PDF as an output format.

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  1. ‘If I knew for certain that the printable area of the paper would hold 20 records vertically and five horizontally’

    You do know that.

    You know the size of your paper. You know the size of your font. You can easily do the math.

    ‘almost certainly limited to HTML…’ doesn’t make much sense. Is this a web application? The page can have a ‘Previous’ and ‘Next’ button to step through the pages? Pick a size that looks good to you and display one page full with ‘Previous’ and ‘Next’ buttons.

    If it’s supposed to be one HTML page that prints correctly, that’s hard. There are CSS things you can do, but you’ll be happier creating a PDF file.

    Get PyX or ReportLab and create a PDF that prints properly.

    I — personally — have no patience with any of this. I try put this kind of thing into a CSV file. My users can then open CSV with a tool spreadsheet (Open Office Org has a good one) and then adjust the columns and print with it.

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