PyOpenOffice 0.4 - The Document Tool (final Version)

The Usability of OpenOffice.org meeting the Power of XML Reporting Technologies - without installing OOo on your server

Caution: For time reasons I had to stop the development of this library. I am not able to give support anymore - sorry. For questions please consult the PyOpenOffice User Guide (see below) and the source code.

FAQ:

What is PyOpenOffice?

• It is an XML based reporting tool, using OpenOffice.org as an easy to use template generator
  
• It is a class library, written in the Python Language.
• It is a platform-independent command-line utility (most abilities of the commandline interface are still missing)

Will PyOpenOffice support the OpenDocument format of OpenOffice.org 2.0?

• Yes and no: as far as I can see the SXW-to-SXW transformations also work with ODT files without any modification
• All PDF operations only work from SXW templates
• From my experience I consider OpenOffice 2.0 still being too buggy to use it in production environments (sorry!) - better you use the last stable version of OOo 1.1
  
• At the moment I do not have enough time to port the code. Interested hackers should have a look at the "Normalizing" procedures and the XSLT stylesheet.
  

What can PyOpenOffice do for you? Here some examples:

• Make serial letters, lists and reports from templates in the SXW-Format and store them anew as SXW-Files
• Replace pictures - generate catalogues, worksheets, photo galleries etc. from an SXW-Template.
  
• Extract the pure text information from the SXW-Document and store it in a plain text file or a PDF-File
  
• Transform SXW-Files to PDF-Files without installing OO - for example on a webserver
• Use OOo as template generator and transform SXW files to RML (Report Markup Language) files
  
• Make serial letters, lists and reports from templates in the RML format and transform them to PDF / HTML
• Replace pictures - generate catalogues, worksheets, photo galleries etc. from an RML template and transform them to PDF / HTML
  

At what stage of development is PyOpenOffice now?

• It is an Beta Release. Nevertheless many parts of it are a "spin-off" product of my software "Bezirksreiter" for church administration - which is considered to be stable now.

What license has PyOpenOffice?

• It is distributed under the Lesser GNU Public License

What software is required?

• Any operating system that supports the following software:
  
• Python 2.3 (maybe it works form 2.1 upwards, but this is not recommended) for the SXW-Processing
• The ReportlabToolkit and the Python Imaging Library for the transformation from SXW to PDF
• Any W3C conformant XSLT processor (for the new XML based features)
  
• OpenOffice.org for viewing and editing the templates
• The PyOpenOffice-Zip-Package
• To get the latest (unstable) version browse the CVS tree on SourceForge.
• The last version (0.31) without XSLT support you find here

What are the principles behind PyOpenOffice?

• Unpacking and Re-Packing of the SXW-Archive-File is done by the Python zipfile Module
  
• Serial letters and reports are processed by using Regular Expressions and string extract and replace operations
• Generating PDF is performed using the XML-SAX-Parser from the Python Standard Library, the ReportlabToolkit and the Python Imaging Library
• For some purposes an XML-DOM-API is used (Minidom from the Python Standard Library)
  
• Plain text extract uses  the SAX-Parser
• Generating RML additionally uses an XSLT processor
• PDF / HTML export with enhanced features now uses "tiny" rml2pdf / rml2html
  
• Read the sources and use pydoc from the Standard Library! But: Too many functions and comments are still in German - sorry

Usage

• Unzip PyOpenOffice.zip into your path
• Make sure that all skripts have write access to this path
  
• Write your skript and import pyopenoffice. Mind: there are still global variables in use, so you always have to use the whole module

Documentation

• All documentation now is in the PyOpenOffice User Guide
• Documentation for the Report Markup Language you find in the RML User Guide
  

Restrictions and Known Bugs

• PDF transformation: PyOpenOffice is intentionally not a WYSIWYG tool! The transforming to PDF is very simple compared with the built-in function of OO - but have you ever tried to install OO on a webserver to deliver PDF's? You need an X-Server or a VNC-Server, vast amount of harddisk space - and you need the approval by your webhoster... But, just try it out: I think nevertheless the PDFs do not look too bad.

Release History

• 0.403 (final): Bugfixes for: Serial letter many file output - Usage with other XSLT processors than libxslt/xsltproc - command line usage.
  
• 0.402: More bugfixes for the new XML based approach.
  
• 0.401: Bugfixes for the OO-to-RML stylesheet.
  
• 0.4: integration of an entire new, more XML based approach using Report Markup Language (RML) and XSLT: enhanced flexibility, better PDF's etc. Read more about this in the new PyOpenOffice User Guide. Ability to work with RML templates (similar to XSL-FO, but easier to use and more powerful) - use OOo as template generator. Several bugfixes.
  
• 0.31: new class persistentDict for the history and cleanup function (the shelve module was not always reliable). Use data with carriage returns in it (for example from a database) and make them printable in SXW or PDF - read the docstring of makeSerialLetters. Several bugfixes.
  
• 0.3 : Generate PDF with arbitrary page sizes (Letter, DIN A5, portrait or landscape etc.) and arbitrary text margins: page sizes and text margins are now taken exactly from the SXW-Template by using an XML-DOM-API (more functions using this API will follow in the next versions). PyOpenOffice now comes with two modules: pyopenoffice.py (main module) and textutilities_pyopenoffice (helper classes and functions).
  
• 0.23 Tables with different column widths now can be mapped to PDF (have a look at test.sxw). History and cleanup functions for the temporary files generated by PyOpenOffice.
  
• 0.22 Bugfixes for makeSerialLetters(): Multi:TFA-...-TFE rows do not have to be the last row of this table anymore. You may now provide sourcefiles that are not in the directory of pyopenoffice.py (in earlier releases PyOpenOffice stopped with an error). New feature for makeSerialLetters(): provide a preprocessed content.xml to the variable "content" (read the docstrings).
  
• 0.21 Coloured background for paragraphs and table cells in PDF. User-defined constants possible for makeSerialLetters() - not only "today" or "heute" allowed. Better explanations in test.sxw.
  
• 0.2 New function to replace pictures. Patch for makeSerialLetters() to make it usable with Asian fonts.  Mind: no PDF support for such fonts yet.
  
• 0.13 Bugfix for transforming tables to PDF: tables with headers are allowed now in the SXW-Template. Support for special signs like the Euro-Symbol by changing from Latin-1 to cp1252-transformation.
  
• 0.12 Bugfix for the makeSerialLetters()-function. Better test.sxw to explain this function.
  
• 0.11 Bugfix for Windows XP, test.sxw adapted for English language users