Lateral Opinion

Since the last release, there have been many changes, improvements and fixes in rst2pdf.

At the bottom of this post you will find (maybe incomplete) list, but I wanted to share a couple of relatively large advances.

Presentations

I have wanted to make rst2pdf useful for presentations for quite a while. And now it's getting close.

I am writing a small tutorial about it, but you can see a demo already.

The changes that make this possible are:

• Fixed bugs regarding page layout
• Added support for page backgrounds (including SVG!)

This was in large part because of César Rodas, who wanted something simple and text-based to do his ZendCon presentation, so he asked me about it, and I was ashamed to give him a broken tool.

See how that works? I am driven by embarrassment. That's embarrasing.

Major stylesheet improvements

The related changes are way too many (see below), but it also happened for a reason: I wanted to make prettier documents.

So, since most people seems to like Sphinx's style, I wanted to look similar.

Did I achieve it? Yes and no, take a look:

web-sphinx by Roberto Alsina

rst2pdf-sphinx by Roberto Alsina

But it's just a draft, I didn't look at fonts, or weight of the headings, or even at what pygments color scheme sphinx is using.

But anyway, even this rough stylesheet made me find a dozen bugs or problems in rst2pdf.

So, the main lesson here is, please tell me what you can and can't do with rst2pdf, because there are whole areas I am not even looking at, day-to-day.

The final thing is... the next release is going to be awesome. But then again, I always say that, don't I?

Changes as of today:

• Workaround for issue 103 so you can use borderPadding as a list (but it will look wrong if you are using wordaxe <= 0.3.2)
• Added fieldvalue style for field lists
• Added optionlist tstyle, for option lists
• Added collection of utility stylesheets and documented it
• Improved command line parsing and stylesheet loading (guess extension like latest rst2latex does)
• Fixed Issue 67: completely new list layouting code
• Fixed Issue 116: crashes caused by huge images
• Better support for %width in images, n2ow it's % of the container frame's width, not of the text area.
• Fixed bug in SVG scaling
• Better handling of missing images
• Added missing styles abstract, contents, dedication to the default stylesheet
• Tables style support spaceBefore and spaceAfter
• New topic-title style for topic titles (obvious ;-)
• 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)
• Default to px for image width specifications instead of pt
• Support all required measurement units ("em" "ex" "px" "in" "cm" "mm" "pt" "pc" "%" "")
• New automated scripts to check test cases for "visual differences"
• Respect images DPI property a bit like rst2latex does.
• Issue 110: New --inline-footnotes option
• Tested with reportlab from SVN trunk
• Support for Dinu Gherman's svglib. If both svglib and uniconvertor are available, svglib is preferred (for SVG, of course). Patch originally by rute.
• Issue 109: Separate styles for each kind of admonition
• For Issue 109: missing styles are not a fatal error
• Issue 117: TOCs with more than 6 levels now supported (raised limit to 9, which is silly deep)