Sunday 29 November 2009

Town Guide (again)

Progress with the Town Guide program stalled a bit when I went on holiday, then was rather busy at work for a while. I am back to thinking about it now.
The current version has two output modes, HTML and PDF - both are quite crude, but work.
The PDF output uses LaTeX, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but I am struggling because LaTeX thinks it knows better than me what the output is supposed to look like - it keeps putting the tables etc. at the end, rather than where I ask for them.
This means I have two options - either do battle with LaTeX to sort it out, or abandon it and go for a more 'direct' PDF production.
I think that as the output I am producing is short and simple, I may as well go for 'direct' production. I am going to have a try with ReportLab's python library (http://www.reportlab.org/oss/rl-toolkit/guide/).
I'll go and read the instructions and see how it goes....