Question

I’m writing a program that requires input in the form of a document, it needs to replace a few values, insert a table, and convert it to PDF. It’s written in Python + Qt (PyQt). Is there any well known document standard which can be easily used programmatically? It must be cross platform, and preferably open.

1. I have looked into Microsoft Doc and Docx, which are binary formats and I can’t edit them. Python has bindings for it, but they’re only on Windows.

2. Open Office’s ODT/ODF is zipped in an xml file, so I can edit that one but there’s no command line utilities or any way to programmatically convert the file to a PDF. Open Office provides bindings, but you need to run Open Office from the command line, start a server, etc. And my clients may not have Open Office installed.

3. RTF is readable from Python, but I couldn’t find any way/libraries to convert RTF documents to PDF.

At the moment I’m exporting from Microsoft Word to HTML, replacing the values and using PyQt to convert it to a PDF. However it loses formatting features and looks awful. I’m surprised there isn’t a well known library which lets you edit a variety of document formats and convert them into other formats, am I missing something?

Update: Thanks for the advice, I’ll have a look at using Latex.

Thanks,
Jackson

Answer 1

Have you looked into using LaTeX documents?

They are perfect to use programatically (compiling documents? You gotta love that…), and you have several Python frameworks you can use such as plasTeX and PyTex.

Exporting a LaTeX documents to PDF is almost immediate.