Python Programming On Win32

Advanced Techniques and Possibilities with PDF and PIDDLE

There are several more techniques and improvements we haven’t added, but that could be easily accomplished if the need arose. This is Open Source, so if they sound useful, they probably will be done by somebody by the time you read this.

Object-oriented graphics and page layout API

The PIDDLE team is working on the “next layer up,” which will hopefully be available by the time this book is printed. This consists of two ideas. First of all, frames identify regions on the page into which drawing may take place; users may specify one main frame per page, or as many as they wish. Second, we create a hierarchy of drawable objects, allowing a high level of reuse. These objects know their size and can wrap themselves to fit a frame if needed. They can be “poured into” a frame until it fills. A Table object might be initialized with an array of data and draw default table cells by itself; named styles allow quick and easy formatting of large tables. A Paragraph object, again tied to a list of styles, allows rapid formatting of text. Individual PIDDLE drawings can also constitute drawable objects and define their own coordinate systems for their contents.

Volume optimizations

The example script runs at about four pages per second, a lot faster than any printer, but nowhere near the speed limit. A large amount of processing is going into generating a text stream, which is almost the same for each page. You can generate the page once ...