Contents
Introduction
The usual way of creating PDF from reStructuredText is by going through LaTeX. This tool provides an alternative by producing PDF directly using the ReportLab library.
Here is some sample output, the beginning of "The Count of Montecristo".
Installation
Download it from this site, then
install manually
python setup.py install
or try the egg with the provided buildout:
python bootstrap.py bin/buildout
you'll get a rst2pdf executable in the bin directory
or get it via PyPI:
easy_install rst2pdf
Features
- User-defined page layout. Multiple frames per page, multiple layouts per document.
- Page transitions
- Cascading stylesheet mechanism, define only what you want changed.
- Supports TTF and Type1 font embedding.
- Any number of paragraph styles using the class directive.
- Any number of character styles using text roles.
- Custom page sizes and margins.
- Syntax highlighter for many languages, using Pygments.
- Supports embedding almost any kind of raster or vector images.
- Fast
- Supports hyphenation (using wordaxe).
- Full user's manual (PDF version)
Screenshot
Not really, since this is a terminal app, but ok :-)
Changes
New in SVN
- Fixed Issue 144 : PDF TOC had wrong page numbers in some cases
- More sphinx compatibility
- New table styles code, also make class directive work for tables
- Fixed Issue 140 : html-like markup in titles was kept in the PDF TOC
- Fixed Issue 138 : Better figure styling. Also fixed bugs in BoxedContainer
- Fixed Issue 137 : bugs in escaping characters in interpreted roles
- Make it work (in a slightly degraded mode) without PIL, as long as you are only using JPGs or have PythonMagick installed.
- Fixed issue 134 : entities were replaced in interpreted roles
- AAFigure support (diagrams using ASCII art)
New in 0.11
- Implemented issue 127: support images in PDF format. Right now they are rasterized, so it's not ideal. Perhaps something better will come up later.
- Fixed issue 129 : make it work around a prblem with KeepTogether in RL 2.1 it probably makes the output look worse in some cases when using that. RL 2.1 is not really supported, so added a warning.
- Fixed issue 130 : use os.pathsep instead of ":" since ":" in windows is used in disk names (and we still pay for DOS idiocy, in 2009)
- Fixed issue 128 : headings level 3+ all looked the same
- Ugly bugfix for Issue 126 : crashes when using images in header + TOC
- More configurable list layouts and more powerful table styling
- Better syntax highlighting (supports bold/italic)
- Workaround for Issue 103
- New collection of utility stylesheets (change paper size, default font, etc with just a command)
- Fixed Issue 67 : completely new list layouting code
- Fixed Issue 116 : crashes caused by huge images
- Better support for %width in images
- Better handling of missing images
- Added styles abstract, contents, dedication, fieldvalue, optionlist, topic-title,
- Vertical alignment for inline images (:align: parameter)
- Issue 118 : Support for :scale: in images and handle resizing of inline images
- Issue 119 : Fix placement of headers and footers
- New background property for page templates (nice for presentations, for example)
- Support all required measurement units ("em" "ex" "px" "in" "cm"
"mm" "pt" "pc" "%" "")
- New automated scripts to check test cases for "visual differences"
- Issue 116 : respect images DPI property
- Issue 110: New --inline-footnotes option
- Tested with Reportlab SVN trunk
- Support for Dinu Gherman's svglib
- Issue 109 : Separate styles for each kind of admonition
- For Issue 109 : missing styles are not a fatal error
- Issue 117 : Support TOCs with more than 5 levels
New in 0.10.1
- Issue 114 : fix ampersands in PDF TOC entries
New in 0.10
- Issue 87 : Table headers can be repeated in each page (thanks to Yasushi Masuda)
- Issue 93 : Line number support for code blocks (:linenos: true)
- Issue 111 : Added --no-footnote-backlinks option
- Issue 107 : Support localized directives/roles (example: sommaire instead of contents)
- Issue 112 : Fixed crash when processing empty list items
- Issue 98 : Nobreak support, and set as default for inline-literals so they don't hyphenate.
- Slightly better tests
- Background colors in text styles work with reportlab 2.3
- Issue 99 : Fixed hyphenation in headers/footers (requires wordaxe 0.3.2)
- Issue 106 : Crash on demo.txt fixed (requires wordxe 0.3.2)
- Issue 102 : Implemented styles for bulleted and numbered lists
- Issue 38 : Default headers/footers via options, config file or stylesheet
- Issue 88 : Implemented much better book-style TOCs
- Issue 100 : Fixed bug with headers/footers and Reportlab 2.3
- Issue 95 : Fixed bug with indented tables
- Issue 89 : Implemented --version
- Issue 84 : Fixed bug with relative include paths
- Issue 85 : Fixed bug with table cell styles
- Issue 83 : Fixed bug with numeric colors in backColor attribute
- Issue 44 : Support for stdin and stdout
- Issue 79 : Added --stylesheet-path option
- Issue 80 : Send warnings to stderr, not stdout
- Issue 66 : Implemented "smart quotes"
- Issue 77 : Work around missing matplotlib
- Proper translation of labels (such as "Author", "Version" etc.) using the
docutils languages package. (r473)
- Fixed problems with wrong or non-existing fonts. (r484)
- Page transition effect support for presentations (r423)
New in 0.9
- Math support via matplotlib (no TeX required)
- Huge bugs fixed
- Support lists that don' t start at 1
- Nicer definition lists
New in 0.8.1
- Support for more complex headers and footers (including image directives and tables)
- Optional inline links
- Wordaxe 0.2.6 support
- Several bugs fixed (issues 48,68,41,60,58,64,67)
- Support for system-wide config file
- Better author metadata
New in 0.8
- Support for vector graphics: SVG, EPS, PS, CDR and others (requires uniconvertor)
- Support for stdin and stdout, so you can use rst2pdf in pipes.
- Works with reportlab 2.2
- Simpler stylesheets (guess bulletFontName, leading, bulletFontSize from other parameters)
- Some support for sphinx
- Fixed the docutils Writer interface
- Fix crash when an image is missing
- Support for config file
- Font sizes can be expressed in units or % of parent style's size
- Larger font size in the default stylesheet
New in 0.7
- Automatic Type1 and True Type font embedding. Just use the font or family name, and (with a little luck), it will be embedded for you.
- width attribute in styles, to create narrow paragraphs/tables
- Styles for table headers and table cells.
- "Zebra tables".
- Improvements in the handling of overflowing literal blocks (code, for instance)
- Different modes to handle too-large literal blocks: overflow/truncate/shrink/error.
- Real sidebars and "floating" elements.
- Fixed link style (no ugly black underlining!)
New in 0.6
- Stylesheet-defined page layout (For example, multicolumn) and layout switching
- Cascading Stylesheets (change exactly what you need changed)
- PDF table of contents
- Current section names and numbers in headers/footers
- Support for compressed PDF files
- Link color is configurable
- Fixed bugs in color handling
- Multilingual hyphenation
- Auto-guessing image size, support for sizes in %
- Gutter margins
- Big refactoring
- More tolerant of minor problems
- Limited raw directive (you can insert pagebreaks and vertical space)
- Implemented a "traditional" docutils writer
- Offer a reasonable API for use as a library
- Fixed copyright/licensing
- code-block now supports including files (whole or in part) so you can highlight external code.
New in 0.5
- Support for :widths: in tables
- Support for captions in tables
- Support for multi-row headers in tables
- Improved definition lists
- Fixed bug in image directive
- Whitespace conforming to PEP8
- Fixed bug in text size on code-block
- Package is more setuptools compliant
- Fix for option groups in option lists
- Citations support
- Title reference role fix
New in 0.4
- Fixed bullet and item lists indentation/nesting.
- Implemented citations
- Working links between footnotes and its references
- Justification enabled by default
- Fixed table bug (demo.txt works now)
- Title and author support in PDF properties
- Support for document title in header/footer
- Custom page sizes and margins
New in 0.3
- Font embedding (use any True Type font in your PDFs)
- Syntax highlighter using Pygments
- User's manual
- External/custom stylesheets
- Support for page numbers in header/footer
