We had our monthly Pyowa meeting yesterday, Thursday, June 2nd at the IMT Group building in West Des Moines. Refreshments were provided. There was pop and Little Caesar’s pizza.
We had two good talks. The first was given by Scott and he spoke on the topics of printing labels to a Dymo label printer using Python and IPP printing with Python. The Dymo printing was done using the PyWin32 library. Scott had written a module of his own that wrapped some of Dymo’s COM objects. Basically, he could pass a pre-created label file that had been created using the Dymo software to his module along with a string to print the label. For the second half of his talk, he told us about his use of the pkipplib module which allows him to print to any printer that uses IPP or via CUPS, the printing system typically found in Linux. You can read the module’s documentation for more information. From the sounds of it, you can print to the printer over HTTPS from anywhere, assuming your firewalls and the printer(s) are configured correctly.
The last talk was about Pisa (AKA xhtml2pdf ?) given by Matt. This allows the developer to create PDFs by writing HTML and then running it through Pisa. The module can use CSS to help style the report and it supports headers, footers and page breaks. Overall, it looks pretty cool.
Our next Pyowa meeting is July 7th, 2011. If you’d like to talk about something you’ve done in Python lately just email me: mike at pythonlibrary dot org or join the mailing list or leave a comment. Feel free to just come out and join the fun sometime too. We allow lightning talks too!