The Mouse Vs. The Python

The Reportlab library is a great way to generate PDFs in Python. Recently, I noticed that it has the ability to do barcodes. I had heard about it being able to generate QR codes, but I hadn’t really dug under the covers to see what else it could do. In this tutorial, we’ll take a look at some of the barcodes that Reportlab can generate. If you don’t already have Reportlab, go to their website and get it before jumping into the article. (more…)

Recently I needed the ability to use Reportlab’s flowables, but place them in fixed locations. Some of you are probably wondering why I would want to do that. The nice thing about flowables, like the Paragraph, is that they’re easily styled. If I could bold something or center something AND put it in a fixed location, then that would rock! It took a lot of Googling and trial and error, but I finally got a decent template put together that I could use for mailings. In this article, I’m going to show you how to do this too. (more…)

I was recently asked to convert a few hundred images into PDF pages. A friend of mine draws comics and my brother wanted to be able to read them on a tablet. Alas, if you had a bunch of files named something like this:


'Jia_01.Jpg', 'Jia_02.Jpg', 'Jia_09.Jpg', 'Jia_10.Jpg', 'Jia_11.Jpg', 'Jia_101.Jpg'


the Android tablet would reorder them into something like this:


'Jia_01.Jpg', 'Jia_02.Jpg', 'Jia_09.Jpg', 'Jia_10.Jpg', 'Jia_101.Jpg', 'Jia_11.Jpg'


And it got pretty confusing the more files you had that were out of order. Sadly, even Python sorts files this way. I tried using the glob module on the directly and then sorting the result and got the exact same issue. So the first thing I had to do was find some kind of sorting algorithm that could sort them correctly. It should be noted that Windows 7 can sort the files correctly in its file system, even though Python cannot. (more…)

A lot of websites are doing year-end retrospectives this week, so I thought you might find it interesting to know which articles on this blog were the most popular this year. Below you will find links to each article along with the page view count I got from Google Analytics:

1. A Simple Step-by-Step Reportlab Tutorial, 9,709 page views, posted 03/08/2010
2. Another Step-by-Step SqlAlchemy Tutorial Part 1, 7,746 page views, posted 02/03/2010
3. Another Step-by-Step SqlAlchemy Tutorial Part 2, 4,858 page views, posted 02/03/2010
4. Manipulating PDFs with Python and pyPdf, 4,511 page views, posted 05/15/2010
5. Python 101: Introspection, 4,473 page views, posted 10/14/2010
6. wxPython: Grid Tips and Tricks, 3,476 page views, posted 04/04/2010
7. wxPython: Creating a Simple MP3 Player, 3,401 page views, posted 04/20/2010
8. Python and Microsoft Office – Using PyWin32, 3,323 page views, posted 07/16/2010
9. wxPython and Threads, 3,183 page views, posted 05/22/2010

It would seem that SqlAlchemy and Reportlab are pretty popular topics. Are there any articles about either of these cool packages that you think I should write? As you can see, wxPython makes it into the top ten 3 times! What should I write about next regarding wxPython?

This upcoming year, I plan to write about some of the other GUI toolkits. Which one do you think I should do first? Tkinter, PySide, PyGUI or something else? What packages or standard libraries do you think I should cover? Feel free to let me know via the comments below or via my contact form (link at top). I’m looking forward to another year of Python tinkering and writing and I hope you are too! Thanks for your readership and encouragement this year!

Back in March of this year, I wrote a simple tutorial on Reportlab, a handy 3rd party Python package that allows the developer to create PDFs programmatically. Recently, I received a request to cover how to do tables in Reportlab. Since my Reportlab article is so popular, I figured it was probably worth the trouble to figure out tables. In this article, I will attempt to show you the basics of inserting tables into Reportlab generated PDFs. (more…)

The subtitle for this article could easily be “How To Create PDFs with Python”, but WordPress doesn’t support that. Anyway, the premier PDF library in Python is Reportlab. It is not distributed with that standard library, so you’ll need to download it if you want to run the examples in this tutorial. There will also be at least one example of how to put an image into a PDF, which means you’ll also need the Python Imaging Library (PIL). As I understand it, Reportlab is compatible with Python 2.x, IronPython and Jython. They are currently working on a port for Python 3.x (or will be soon). (more…)