What's a good document standard to use programmatically?

Question

Hi,

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.

Answer 2

I don't know the kind of odience of your program, Tex is good and i would go with it.
Another possible choice is Excel format, parsing it with xlrd.
I've used it a couple of time and it's pretty straightforward.
Excel file is a good for the following reasons:

1. Well known format easy to edit
2. You could prepare a predefined template with constrains and table

Answer 3

You might want to try ReportLab. The open source version can write PDFs, and the commercial version has a lot of really nice abstractions to allow output to a variety of different formats from a single input.

Answer 4

Creating XML documents, transforming them to XSL/fo and rendering with Fop or RenderX. If you use docbook as the primary input, there are toolchains freely available for converting that to PDF, RTF, HTML and so forth.

It is rather quirky to use and not my idea of fun, but is does deliver and can be embedded in an application, AFAICT.

Creating docbook is very straightforward as it has a wide range of semantic tags, table support etc to give a "meaningful" markup which can be reliably formatted. The XSL stylesheets are modular and allow parts to be customized or replaced to generate your own look and feel.

It works well for relatively free flow documents with lots of text.

For filling in the blanks kind of documents, a regular reporting engine may be a better fit, or some straighforward XSL stylesheets spitting out the XSL-fo directly.

Answer 5

Since you're already using PyQt anyway, it might be worth looking at Qt's built-in RTF processing module which looks decent. Here's the documentation on detailed content manipulation including inserting tables. Also the QPrinter module's default print-to-file format happens to be PDF.

Without knowing more about your particular needs it's hard to say if these would do what you want, but since your application already has PyQt as a dependency, seems silly to introduce any more without evaluating the functionality you've already got available.

The non-GUI parts of the Qt framework are often overlooked though.

edit: included more links.