Today we’re going to take a look at the controversial easy_install method of installing Python modules and packages. We will also learn how to create our own *.egg files. You will need to go get the SetupTools package to follow along. This package doesn’t support Python 3.x so if you need that, see pip or […]
Python 101: easy_install or how to create eggs Read More »
Not sure how I missed this, but PyCon 2013 is already open for proposals, which means if you like to talk about Python, now’s your chance to show your chops! You can propose a talk, a tutorial or a poster. Head on over to their prospectus for more information. PyCon is a lot of fun
PyCon USA 2013 – Call for Proposals are Open Read More »
The other day on StackOverflow I saw someone who was struggling with the Wizard widget from wxPython. The wizard doesn’t allow much customization when it comes to its buttons, so I decided to see how hard it would be to just write my own Wizard. This code is pretty limited, but here’s my first beta
wxPython: How to Create a Generic Wizard Read More »
Today I learned that the pyPDF project is NOT dead, as I had originally thought. In fact, it’s been forked into PyPDF2 (note the slightly different spelling). There’s also a possibility that someone else has taken over the original pyPDF project and is actively working on it. You can follow all that over on reddit
PyPDF2: The New Fork of pyPdf Read More »
Today we’ll be looking at a simple PDF generation library called pyfpdf, a port of FPDF which is a php library. This is not a replacement for Reportlab, but it does give you more than enough to create simple PDFs and may meet your needs. Let’s take a look and see what it can do!
An Intro to pyfpdf – A Simple Python PDF Generation Library Read More »
Last time we learned how to create modules and packages. Today we’re going to take the package we created and use Python’s distutils to create a couple different ways to distribute our code. In this tutorial, we’ll be learning the following: How to create a setup.py file How to create a source distribution How to
Python 201: An Intro to distutils Read More »
Creating Python modules is something that most Python programmers do every day. Any time you save a new Python script, you have created a new module. You can import your module into other modules. A package is a collection of modules. The things you import into your scripts from the standard library are modules or
Python 201: Creating Modules and Packages Read More »
I’m always on the lookout for Python PDF libraries and I happened to stumble across pdfrw the other day. It looks like a replacement to pyPDF in that it can read and write PDFs, join PDFs and can use Reportlab for concatenation and watermarking, among other things. The project also appears slightly dead in that
A Quick Intro to pdfrw Read More »
My long time readers may remember me mentioning that I was trying to put my article code into a Mercurial repository on bitbucket. I haven’t been doing a very good job of that lately, but I did decide to release a whole bunch of wxPython example scripts on there. I use them a lot when
wxPython by Example Repository Read More »
A couple years ago I wrote a rather flawed tutorial about SQLAlchemy. I decided it was about time for me to re-do that tutorial from scratch and hopefully do a better job of it this time around. Since I’m a music nut, we’ll be creating a simple database to store album information. A database isn’t
A Simple SqlAlchemy 0.7 / 0.8 Tutorial Read 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
Reportlab: Mixing Fixed Content and Flowables Read More »
The other day I saw a question on StackOverflow about how to dynamically destroy and create panels after a certain amount of time has passed. I told the fellow that he could use the examples from one of my blog articles where I destroyed and created buttons, but the dude just didn’t get it. So
wxPython: Making a panel self-destruct Read More »
I meant to write up a post on this within a week of reading about it, but then things got busy and I forgot. Anyway, there’s a new widget in the wxPython toolkit called the ShortcutEditor. You can read about it on the wxPython mailing list. You’ll probably have to update the agw lib folder
The New ShortcutEditor for wxPython Read More »
Most computer users of this day and age use drag and drop (DnD) instinctively. You probably used it to transfer some files from one folder to another this week! The wxPython GUI toolkit provides drag and drop functionality baked in. In this tutorial, we’ll see just how easy it is to implement!
wxPython: Introduction to Drag and Drop Read More »
The other day I was asked if there was a way to sort a dictionary by value. If you use Python regularly, then you know that the dictionary data structure is by definition an unsorted mapping type. Some would define a dict as a hash table. Regardless, I needed a way to sort a nested
Python 201: How to sort a dictionary by value Read More »