Does a wysiwyg editor for report lab's rml exist?

Question

I've searched around for drag-and-drop editors which act similarly to MSAccess report builder but generates Report Markup Language™. However, I could not find any existing products.

Could it be true then that everyone hand codes the designs of their PDFs? Surely there must be a WYSIWYG editor somewhere.

Anyone know of any? It would help tremendously.

Note. Would there be any demand for one to be built?

score 6 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 21 '12 at 11:36

Thanks to OpenERP tool sxw2rml , you can use Open Office writer as a WYSIWYG editor for RML . It takes old style Oowriter files and generates clean rml out of them which you can then manipulate .

Flow that works for me is

Oowriter [doc] ----> openerp_sxw2rml.py [rml] ----> trml2pf.py [pdf]

Links:

Ref Links : http://doc.openerp.com/v6.0/developer/3_11_reports/11_1_openoffice_report.html
Older code of sw2rml.py can be found here http://dev.communesplone.org/trac/browser/communesplone/openerp/training/training/report/tiny_sxw2rml/tiny_sxw2rml.py?rev=3486
For latest version check openerp https://code.launchpad.net/~openerp/

i think this just openerp solution – Bdwey Aug 10 '14 at 17:17 — Bdwey, Aug 10 '14 at 17:17

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 27 '11 at 15:45

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You can also have a look at Relatorio. It is not RML but it is WYSIWYG. http://relatorio.openhex.org/

answered Jun 27 '11 at 15:45

ced

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score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 10 '11 at 01:14

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To the best of my knowledge none exists, probably because those of us using ReportLab choose it because we chose Python first and then went looking for a tool to generate PDF reports from within Python.

What would be the purpose of a WYSIWYG RML editor? In general I think most of us generate RML (or use Platypus) in code based on the results of processing some kind of data in Python, so most of the interesting stuff has to be done in code anyway.

answered Mar 10 '11 at 01:14

Gordon Seidoh Worley

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Many thanks for your input. I was looking at the examples PDFs on the report lab site with the customized layouts (e-brochures and the kind) and was wondering if these companies used an editor or did it all in code. – Jimle_uk Mar 10 '11 at 10:41
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"What would be the purpose of a WYSIWYG RML editor?". It would be useful to create a template in a WYSYWIG editor and add variables via python. – wobbily_col Jun 20 '16 at 08:26

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 30 '19 at 09:42

I have been using iReport Designer for this(Report Designer of Jasper Reports). But i am not using RML. I have a custom xml(structured more like RML) file which using my python script converts to PDF.

Since jrxml and RML are perfectly structured xml files, you can create your own python function to convert the jrxml to RML. Just that The iReport coordinates need to be converted to reportlab coordinates and create appropriate RML tags.

Cannot make use of reportlab features 100% , can use all the basic elements.

Hope this gives you some idea

Does a wysiwyg editor for report lab's rml exist?

4 Answers4