[PyKDE] Printing (General)

[Jim Bublitz]

On 11-Mar-03 Kenneth Godee wrote:
> Ok, since I still consider myself a newbee to
> PyQt maybe I'm missing something?
 
> 1. Line by Line printing at screen res. with single size font
> seems easy enough, oh, wait better make that the a fixed
> resolution because screen resolution can change from computer to
> computer. Results fair, but to plain to be usefull.
 
> 2. Other than that I can't seem to find ANY kind of report
> layout/generator. So what does everyone do to layout a page(s)
> with different fonts, font sizes, boxes etc., position each and
> every piece hand coded and postioned pixel by pixel? Thats the
> only way I can figure it out. 
> 
> 3. How do you add logos or art work at a higher resolutions(ie.
> 600dpi), 81dpi doesn't cut it. I tried scaling up, of coarse
> that doesn't work. I even tried creating a layout of something
> like 6,000 x 4,000 and adding 600dpi artwork, fonts at like 200
> points and grabing the widget and printing at
> HiResolution(600dpi).
> It looked good but brought my 2ghz machine to a crawl even for a
> simple layout. I tried using Designer as a report layout
> designer and "grabbing" an instance of that even at 81dpi, but
> once it gets converted to a pixmap, even the normal size fonts
> get trashed.
 
> 4. I'll battle it out one way or the other, but maybe I'm missing
> something? I hate the thought of going to something like an
> external app and not staying with PyQt for report generation.
> I've looked at most(everyone I could find, anyway) of the
> external report generators and most don't look promising, if you
> just want to do direct printing and not PDF. I guess this is why
> some of these external programs can  generate extreme pricing,
> for all the reasons above.
 
> What do some of the other people do to get clean reporting from
> PyQt. Or does anyone have any other report/generation/printing
> solutions.

Have you looked at QPrinter? I haven't actually used it that I can
recall, but you should be able to lay out reports in QtDesigner and
print them at higher dpi - at least that's what I get from
reading the QPrinter docs.

What I've done for printing forms (invoices, purchase orders,
packing lists, etc) is use ReportLab which is a Python PDF
generator. The way I used it is probably at a lower level than
you're looking for, however I think they have some higher level
stuff too. I don't have a URL handy, but a search on "ReportLab"
should turn it up pretty quickly. I wouldn't necessarily call it
'easy' though.

Jim