Re: Alternatives for reST -> PDF

On Wed, 29 Mar 2006, G. Milde wrote:

> On 28.03.06, Nick Moffitt wrote:
>> G. Milde:

> Wanted: Alternatives for reST -> PDF

in general check the sandbox 
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/links.html

>>>> What alternatives are there? Can I render from reST to PDF via some
>>>> other, more reliable route, avoiding (La)TeX and all its annoyances?
>
> What I would like to see is a script that does the reST2PDF conversion
> with one command, similar to rst2html or rst2latex.
>
> pdflatex
> --------
>
> My first suggestion was a wrapper script around pdflatex that would
> care for the necessary preparation, run as many times as needed and
> clean up afterwards thus bypassing the most obvious annoyances of LaTeX.
>
> There is a script to facilitate pdf creation at
> http://developer.berlios.de/projects/tex2pdf/
> that could serve as a base.

in the sandbox

   Beni Cherniavsky maintains a Makefile for driving Docutils, hoping to
   handle everything one might do with Docutils.

>>> If you care for best layout quality, LaTeX might still be the
>>> ultimative choice.
>>
>> With respect, LaTeX hasn't been the king of layout in a long time.  It
>> works most of the time, true, and ten years ago it was a jewel in the
>> Free Software crown, but it has shown its age since then.  It's pretty
>> warty.  I'm kind of irritated at the person who thought that simply
>> suggesting pdflatex or whatever would solve all of LaTeX's warts and
>> misfeatures.
>
> I do not suggest that LaTeX is up to date or has a well designed user
> interface. But I still consider the output of LaTeX of excellent
> quality, especially in the field of science and math.

> Scribus
> -------
>
>> One thing that might turn out useful would be a Scribus-writer.  Scribus
>> also uses an XML format, so it may even be possible to play goofy XSLT
>> games on the docutils internal XML format stuff.
>>
>> One drawback seems to be that Scribus currently doesn't operate
>> headless.
>
> Inkscape
> --------
>
>> I may have been thinking of Inkscape (which I've used to render
>> script-generated SVG into PNG).
>
> Inkskape could be an option too, as it can convert SVG to ps (and ps to
> pdf is easy with Ghostscripts ps2pdf). (You do not really want to
> produce PDF from PNG, will you?)
>
> You still need some script to convert reST (or XML) to SVG.
>
>
> Prince
> ------
>
> An interesting alternative is http://www.princexml.com/, converting HTML
> + CSS to PDF. It is not free. The site offers a trial version for
> download.
>
>
> CSSToXSLFO and FOP
> ------------------
>
> CSSToXSLFO (http://www.re.be/css2xslfo/) is a utility which can convert an
> XML document, together with a CSS2 style sheet, into an XSL-FO document,
> which can then be converted into PDF, PostScript, etc. with an
> XSL-FO-processor. It has special support for the XHTML vocabulary,
> because that is the most obvious language it would be used for. The tool
> has a number of page-related extensions. It also comes with an API in the
> form of an XML filter.
>
> The XSL-FO to PDF conversion could be done with the free tool FOP
> from Apache http://xml.apache.org/fop/.

the sandbox of d.priest contains to my knowledge this piece.

> ReportLab
> ---------
>
> The ReportLab Open Source PDF library (http://www.reportlab.org/) is a Python
> library which could be used to produce a "native" PDF writer.

but reportlab isnt latex, so on emight have to add some whistles.

cheers

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