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RML User Guide - Bezirksreiter

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1. some label some label some label There may also be instances where you want obvious dividers between each subcell but you don t want entirely separate boxes Letterboxes have something that allows for this the optional combHeight attribute Revision 1 16 In a standard letterBoxes element ie one where the combHeight isn t specified the divider between each individual subcell is a line which fills the whole height of the letterBoxes box If you specify the combHeight you can vary the height of this line This attribute must be a number between zero and one where 0 means no divider at all and 1 means one that is the whole height of the letterboxes element and therefore 0 25 is a quarter of the height and so on The following code creates a row of sample letterboxes showing the combHeight attribute in use lt letterBoxes lt letterBoxes lt letterBoxes lt letterBoxes x 0cm y combHeight 0 count 4 gt comb lt letterBoxes gt 3 75 yz 0cm combHeight 0 25 count 4 gt comb lt letterBoxes gt x5 7 5cm combHeight 1 count 4 gt comb lt letterBoxes gt x 11 25cm y 0cm lineWidth 0 1cm boxWidth 0 75cm boxHeight 0 75cm boxFillColor yellow boxStrokeColor blue label combHeight fontName Times Bold fontSize 14 combHeight 0 5 count 4 gt comb lt letterBoxes gt Page 52 of 123 combHeight RML Use
2. seqFormat id myID value i is used to associate a numbering format to myID The allowed values for the value attribute are given in the table below 1 pm e Uppercase Roman Lowercase Alphabetic Uppercase Alphabetic Here is an example that shows lt seq gt lt seqReset gt and segDefault inuse EXAMPLE 6 lt xml version 1 0 encoding iso 8859 1 standalone no gt lt DOCTYPE document SYSTEM rml 1 O dtd document filename example 6 pdf template lt pageTemplate id main gt frame id first x1 72 1 72 width 451 height 698 gt lt pageTemplate gt lt template gt lt stylesheet gt lt stylesheet gt lt story gt lt 1 gt seq in seq seqDefault and seqReset lt 1 gt lt para gt copied seq id spam gt seq id spam gt seq id spam gt Reset seqReset id spam seq id spam seq id spam gt seq id spam para lt h2 gt lt i gt simple use of seq lt i gt lt h2 gt lt para gt First seq lt seq gt lt para gt lt para gt Second seq lt seq gt lt para gt lt spacer length 6 gt lt para gt lt seqReset gt have just done a amp lt seqReset amp gt para spacer length 6 gt para First seq after seqReset seg para para second seq after seqReset seg para spacer length 6 gt para If you are going to use multiple
3. amas tz Mais ore DICE I T T e I grs ass pans bg pass rums Mara reri tanan amu Beg pa Fish peka kas bag hish binis merry bins bimh aa LE kia rs Coh bm ara bie bie Hrs ask iio ARA kasa biah Ps MA Kas TU gh FR d T kapa Bis bisd bk rica rina tia rn mom iie ie paan e Hasi Fast ria hisi imere biah Pisi 3 Mangga D pena erect Ces M Kasa a ruin tinh ii a ore cra ah Ae paa Hs HEN Bau as aqa p iini iia iiie oa Asi Hio S fave MIA iis siri bin ier sup bini iig qp Anna iiri bae Ban pe SS Figure 32 Output from EXAMPLE 5 7 9 Asian Fonts RML provides basic support for all of Adobe s Asian Font Packs You can display text in Japanese Traditional and Simplified Chinese and Korean using two different techniques The most robust technique is to include the standard Asian fonts Adobe specifies for use with Acrobat Reader These will already be installed on the end user s machine if they have a localized copy of Acrobat Reader or may be dow
4. For example to specify a 1 b 1 2 cz1 3 d 1 4 e 1 5 and f 1 6 write lt transform gt 1 1 2 1 3 1 4 1 5 1 6 lt transform gt NOTE All the examples from this section are gathered together in the file example 8 rml 10 9 About scale rotate and skew e Itis very easy to move objects off the page If you are doing a lt translate gt asa lt pageGraphic gt it is possible to put the origin off the visible area of the page If you are doing a translate inan lt illustration gt no checks are performed about whether an object is inside the limits of the lt illustration gt or not so it is still possible to put it outside the limits of the page and lose it If you expect to see a diagram and all you get is a blank page this is the most common cause e Scaling has its own version of the same problem It is possible to lt scale gt an object so that most or all of it is off the page but it is also possible to lt scale gt something to such a small size that it shrinks to nothing Be especially careful when doing scaling with large factors Something that may have been a small error without the scaling may put your object off the page entirely once you have Page 66 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 performed the scale e The scaling operation scales everything including line widths If you are taking a huge diagram and scaling it down the lines may be scaled out of existence Conversely if you take something mic
5. It has one required attribute Length It has two optional attributes start and stop blockRightPadding This sets the padding between the contents of a cell and right hand edge of the cell for a block of cells in your table It has one required attribute length Page 75 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 It has two optional attributes start and stop blockBottomPadding This sets the padding between the contents of a cell and bottom edge of the cell for a block of cells It has one required attribute length It has two optional attributes start and stop e blockTopPadding This sets the padding between the contents of a cell and top edge of the cell for a block of cells It has one required attribute length It has two optional attributes start and stop e blockBackground This sets the color to be used for the background for a block of cells in your table It has one required attribute colorName It has two optional attributes start and stop e lineStyle This allows you to use lines to border your table It has two required attributes kind with the options of GRID BOX OUTLINE INNERGRID LINEBELOW LINEABOVE LINEBEFORE and LINEAFTER and colorName which must be the name of a color It has three optional attributes thickness start and stop 11 4 More about block tables A few final things to be aware about when using tables in RML 1 0 table
6. document filename example 11 gt template lt pageTemplate id main gt lt pageGraphics gt lt pageGraphics gt frame id first x1 72 1 72 width 451 height 698 gt lt pageTemplate gt lt template gt lt stylesheet gt lt blockTableStyle id myBlockTableStyle gt lt Set fonts gt lt blockFont name Courier Bold size 10 start 0 1 stopz 1 1 lt blockFont name Helvetica BoldOblique size 10 start 0 0 stop 3 0 gt This sets textColor for all the text in the table gt lt blockTextColor colorName black gt lt Another example of blockTextColor gt lt blockTextColor colorName green start 2 2 stop 3 3 gt lt This sets a blockAlignment for the whole table gt lt blockAlignment value CENTER lt These overrides the above gt lt blockAlignment value RIGHT start 3 0 stop 3 1 gt lt blockAlignment value LEFT start 0 1 stop 0 1 lt This sets the vertical alignment for one row gt lt blockValign value TOP start 0 0 stop 1 0 lt This sets the vertical alignment for one cell gt lt blockValign value MIDDLE start 2 2 stop 2 2 gt Use of linestyles gt lt lineStyle kind GRID colorName silver lt lineStyle kind LINEBELOW colorName orangered start 0 0 stopz 1 0 thickness 5 gt lt lineStyle kind LINEAFTER colorName maroon start 1 1 stop 1
7. lt seqReset id testOne We have just done a amp lt seqReset id testOne amp gt para spacer length 6 gt para First seq after seqReset for testOne seq id testOne para para second seq after seqReset for testOne seq id testOne para spacer length 6 gt para First seq after seqReset for testTwo seq id testTwo para para Page 42 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 second seq after seqReset for testTwo seq id testTwo para spacer length 15 gt para Notice how resetting testOne doesn t affect testTwo at all para story document seq in seq seqDefault and seqReset copied 4 5 6 Reset 1 2 3 simple use of seq First seq 3 Second seq 4 We have just done a lt seqReset gt First seq after seqReset 1 second seq after seqReset 2 If you are going to use multiple seq tags you need to use the id attribute Better use of seq We have just done a seqDefault id test gt We have just done a lt seqReset id test gt First seq 1 Second seq 2 We have just done a seqReset id test gt First seq after seqReset 1 second seq after seqReset 2 Using two seqs independently We have just done a lt seqReset id testOne gt We have just done a lt seqReset id testTwo gt First seq for testOne 1 Second seq for testOne 2 First seq for testTwo 1 Second seq for testT wo
8. lt stylesheet gt lt blockTableStyle id myBlockTableStyle gt lt blockBackground colorName silver start 0 0 stopz 1 0 lt blockBackground colorName darkslategray start 0 1 stop 1 1 gt lt blockBackground colorName silver start 0 2 stop 1 2 lt blockBackground colorName darkslategray start 0 3 stopz 1 3 lt blockBackground colorName silver start 0 4 stopz 1 4 lt blockBackground colorName darkslategray start 0 5 stopz 1 5 lt blockAlignment value CENTER lt blockValign value MIDDLE lt Set fonts gt lt blockFont name Helvetica BoldObligue size 10 gt lt set the left and right padding for cells in first and third columns gt remember cell numbering starts from ZERO not ONE gt lt blockLeftPadding length 20 start 0 0 stop 0 1 lt blockRightPadding length 20 start 2 0 stop 2 1 lt set the top and bottom padding for cells in first and third rows gt lt blockBottomPadding length 40 start 0 0 stopz 1 0 lt blockTopPadding length 40 start 0 2 stop 1 2 gt lt set the top and bottom padding for the last row gt lt blockBottomPadding length 40 start 1 4 stopz 1 4 lt blockTopPadding length 40 start 0 4 stop 0 4 gt lt Use of linestyles gt lt lineStyle kind GRID colorName darkblue lt blockTableStyle gt lt paraStyle name paddingTableStyle fontName Hel
9. lt transform gt 1 0 05 3 2 121 10 1 15 transform lineMode lineMode width 0 2cm dash lem zem join round cap sguare gt Style Elements initialize lt initialize gt lt alias gt lt name gt lt color gt lt initialize gt paraStyle Page 117 of 123 Revision 1 16 angle in degrees required angle in degrees required six number affine transformation matrix measurement measurements round mitered or bevelled default round or square sequence of alias name or color tags RML User Guide paraStyle gt boxStyle lt boxStyle gt name mystyle alias pretty parent oldstyle fontname Courier Oblique fontsize 13 leading 20 leftIndent 1 25in rightIndent 2 5in firstLineIndent 0 5in spaceBefore 0 2in spaceAfter 3cm alignment justify bulletFontname Courier bulletFontsize 13 bulletIndent 0 2in textColor red backColor cyan name mystyle alias pretty parent oldstyle fontname Courier Oblique Fontsize 13 alignment left textColor blue labelFontName Courier labelFontSize 13 labelAlignment left label TextColor 5lue boxFillColor blue boxStrokecolor blue cellWidth lin cellHeight lin Page 118 of 123 Revision 1 16 string string string string measurement measurement measurement measurement measurement measurement measurement left right
10. 11 3 Block table styles blockTables area flowable so the actual blockTable tag will appear in the story section of your RML document You can use the blockTableStyle tag to set the appearance of your blockTable This appears in the stylesheet section of your document and can be used for more than one table You can set up how all the blockTables in your document will look in one blockTableStyle tag if you want The blockTableStyle tagisa container for a number of other tags and needs to be paired with a terminal lt blockTableStyle gt tag This works in the same way as styleSheet styleSheet lt pageGraphics gt lt pageGraphics gt and other tags of that sort For all of the attributes in blockTableStyle they refer to a square or rectangular block inside the table This can be as many or as few cells as you want not necessarily a single cell This block aspect to the attributes is reflected in their names and gave the table style its name for consistency It was felt that since most of these attributes started with block the table tag should itself be called blockTable to keep things simple The way the block is described may seem unusual to you if you are not used to programming The x and y co ordinates are still given as X Y or if you like Row Column rather than the spreadsheet model but the numbering starts from 0 rather than 1 This makes the top left hand cell 0 0 As well as this the
11. RML User Guide Report Markup Language Version 1 0 Lombard Business Park 103 Bayard Street 8 Lombard Road New Brunswick Wimbledon New Jersey 08901 London ENGLAND SW19 3TZ USA RML User Guide Contents 1 Introduction 5 1 1 The ReportLab Enterprise Reporting Solution 5 1 2 Installation and Use 5 1 3 What is RML 7 1 4 What is this document 7 1 5 Who is this document aimed at 7 1 6 Conventions used in this document 7 Part I The Basics 8 2 Pages and page structures 9 2 1 XML syntax and RML 9 2 2 The prolog 9 2 3 Document forms stylesheet pageDrawing vs template stylesheet story 10 3 Basic Text Operations 13 3 Coordinates and measurements 13 3 2 Using Colors 13 3 3 Using fonts 14 3 4 Basic text operations setFont and drawString 14 4 Basic figures lines and shapes 16 4 Rect circle and ellipse 16 4 2 Fill and stroke 19 4 3 Lines and lineMode 19 5 Graphics vs Flowables 26 6 More about pages and page structures 27 6 1 More about template and pageTemplate 27 6 2 Frame and nextFrame 28 6 3 condPageBreak conditional page breaks 28 6 4 storyPlace out of band flowables 28 6 5 pto Please Turn Over Control 29 6 6 More about stylesheets 29 7 Advanced text 31 7 1 Title 31 7 2 Headings hl h2 h3 31 7 3 Paragraphs and paragraph styles 31 7 4 The font tag 32 7 5 Superscripts and subs
12. fill no stroke yes round 0 15 in fill color green gt stroke color black gt rect 254 5 yz 56 5 width 1 in height 1 15 in fill yes stroke no round 0 15 in gt fill color blue gt stroke color black gt rect 424 5 yz 56 5 width 1 in height 1 15 in fill yes stroke yes round 0 15 in fill color black gt drawCentredString x 127 5 y 41 25 gt Page 18 of 123 Revision 1 16 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 Rect with stroke and round but no fill drawCentredString drawCentredString 297 5 y 41 25 gt Rect with fill and round but no stroke drawCentredString drawCentredString 467 5 y 41 25 gt Rect with stroke fill and round drawCentredString lt pageGraphics gt frame id first x1 0 5in 1 0 5 width 20cm height 28cm gt lt pageTemplate gt lt template gt lt stylesheet gt lt stylesheet gt lt story gt lt para gt lt para gt lt story gt lt document gt 4 2 Fill and stroke If you look at the example 3 you will see that as well as having 111 and stroke attributes for the shapes there are separate fill and stroke tags Inside the tag for a shape such as rect fill and stroke simply tell rml2pdf whether those qualities should be turned on Should there be a 111 or not Should there be a st roke or not That is why the argument is Boolean
13. height the width and height of the flowable Example lt pageGraphics gt lt place x 10 5cm y 10 5cm width 9cm height 9cm gt lt para gt Your flowables would go here lt para gt Page 67 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 place pageGraphics illustration You can think of an illustration as like one of the illustrations in a book It is a box of space on the page which can contain any of the graphics that you would normally expect to find in lt pageGraphics gt tag The position of this box depends purely on its place in the story which means that it can appear anywhere on the page depending on the paragraphs and other flowables around it This is in contrast to the pageGraphics which are always placed in a specific place measured from the origin Example illustration width 90 height 90 gt fill color red circle 45 y 45 radius 30 fill yes lt setFont name Times Roman size 8 gt lt drawString x 0 y 0 gt Any graphics could go here lt drawString gt lt illustration gt illustrations in the story a place inside a grid Figure 42 Output from EXAMPLE 9 Notice the symmetry the place tag lets you use flowables within a lt pageGraphic gt the illustration tag lets you do graphics operations in a box within the flow of the story or story like context such as a table cell The following example shows the us
14. lt story gt lt story gt lt document gt Above is the story based form for the document tag document lt document filename myfile pdf string gt lt stylesheet gt lt stylesheet gt lt pageInfo gt lt pageInfo gt lt pageDrawing gt lt pageDrawing gt lt document gt Above is the PageDrawing based form for the document tag Revision 1 16 required required optional one or more The document tag is the root tag for RML docuoments Every RML document must contain on and only one document tag There are two forms for a document the story form and the pageDrawing form template template pageSize 8 5in llin pair of lengths firstPageTemplate main page template id leftMargin lin length rightMargin lin length topMargin 1 5in length bottomMargin 1 5in length showBoundary false truth value allowSplitting true truth value title my title string authors yvours truly string gt lt pageTemplate gt lt pageTemplate gt lt template gt Page 99 of 123 1 or more RML User Guide stylesheet lt stylesheet gt lt initialize gt lt initialize gt lt paraStyle gt lt blockTableStyle gt lt blockTableStyle gt lt stylesheet gt story lt story gt lt para gt lt para gt lt illustration gt lt illustration gt lt story gt pagelnfo pageInfo pageSize 8 5in llin pair of lengths gt pageDr
15. As such this is where headers paragraphs and the actual text is contained This is the story This is the part a the document where yor text is placed It should be enclosed im para and para tags 0 m into paragraphes Figure 26 Output from EXAMPLE 2 EXAMPLE 2 lt DOCTYPE document SYSTEM rml 1 O dtd document filename example 2 pdf template lt pageTemplate id main gt frame id first x1 72 1 72 width 451 height 698 gt lt pageTemplate gt lt template gt lt stylesheet gt lt stylesheet gt lt The story starts below this comment gt lt story gt lt para gt This is the Story This is the part of the RML document where your text is placed lt para gt lt para gt It should be enclosed in para and para tags to turn it into paragraphs lt para gt lt story gt lt document gt The lt pageTemplate gt lt pageGraphics gt lt frame gt and lt paraStyle gt tags will all be covered in more detail later on in this guide Paragraphs start with a para tag and are closed witha lt para gt tag Their appearance can be controlled with the lt paraStyle gt tag RML allows you to use comments in the RML code These are not displayed in the output PDF file Just like in HTML they start with a lt and are terminated with a gt Unlike other tags comments cannot be nested In fact you can t even ha
16. These advantages become even more obvious with multiple similar documents If you are dealing with a run of 5000 repetitive forms perhaps payslips or single page invoices you only need to store the backdrop once and simply draw the changing text on each page forms should be used whenever you have a graphic that is used repeatedly It may be something as small as your company logo or some sort of symbol you want to flag interesting bits of text with or something as large as a whole page backdrop As long as you use it repeatedly it s worth using a form to do it forms don even have to be created in RML You can use another application such as Adobe Illustrator or Word and distil the output to PDF You can then use our PageCatcher product to generate the forms which can then be used from RML Look on our web site for more information on PageCatcher http www reportlab com pageCatcher index html Page 71 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 Part III Tables Page 72 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 11 Using tables 11 1 Block tables If you are familiar with HTML you will understand the basic tags for use with tables in RML Just as in HTML you use a tag to tell rml2pdf that a table is on the way this case blockTable rather than lt table gt and another one to end it Within the blockTable and lt blockTable gt tags tr and tr enclose the rows from Table Row and within each table
17. false gt grid grid xS 1in 2 3in ys 7in 7 2in 7 4in gt lines lines lin lin 2in 2in lin 2in 2in 3in lin 3in 2in 4in lt lines gt Page 110 of 123 measurement measurement measurement truth value truth value measurement measurement measurement measurement measurement truth value truth value measurements measurements Revision 1 16 required required required required required required required required required quadruples of measurements representing line segments RML User Guide curves lt curves gt lin lin 2in 2in 2in 3in lin 3in lin 2in 2in 3in 2in 4in lin 4in lin 3in 2in 4in 2in 5in lin 5in lt curves gt image lt image file cute jpg x lin y Jin width 5cm height 3cm gt place place 1 y Jin width 5in height 3in gt lt para gt lt para gt lt illustration gt lt illustration gt lt place gt doForm lt doForm name logo gt Page 111 of 123 string measurement measurement measurement measurement measurement measurement measurement measurement string Revision 1 16 octtuples of measurements representing Bezier curves required required required required required required required Sequence of top level flowables required RML User Guide plugInGraphic plugInGraphic module mymodule function myfunction string data
18. gt lt boxStyle name special2 parent speciall fontName Courier fontSize 12 textColor green labelFontName Courier labelFontSize 12 labelTextColor green boxFillColor yellow boxStrokeColor red With the style speciall style special1 style special1 aye speca And with the style special2 style special2 style special2 Barcodes One other tag that may often find use on forms is the barCode tag As its name implies this creates a barcode in one of a number of different symbologies The three attributes you need to supply for this tag are x and y to position it on the page and code to inform rml2pdf which form of barcode you require This is a brief example of what a barcode tag looks like in use and what it actually produces lt barCode x lcm y 0 code Code11 gt 123456 lt barCode gt Figure 34 The 11 barcode Page 54 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 This table shows you the allowed names for the code attribute along with an example of the barcode produced m Ww USPS FIM nw Page 55 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 9 About Cross References and Page Numbers Many documents such as this one require page cross references For example the table of contents of this user guide lists the page numbers of the beginnings of each part
19. gt Page 106 of 123 Revision 1 16 string string string string 1lillla A string template name required RML User Guide condPageBreak lt condPageBreak height 10cm gt story Place lt storyPlace x lin 7 width 5in height 3in origin page gt lt para gt lt para gt lt table gt lt table gt lt storyPlace gt pto lt pto gt lt pto_trailer gt lt pto_trailer gt lt pto_header gt lt pto_header gt lt para gt lt para gt lt table gt lt table gt lt pto gt pto_trailer lt pto_trailer gt lt para gt lt para gt lt table gt lt table gt lt pto_trailer gt Page 107 of 123 measurement measurement measurement measurement measurement page frame or local Revision 1 16 required required required required required optional Sequence of top level flowables optional optional Sequence of top level flowables Only in PTO Sequence of top level flowables RML User Guide pto header pto header lt para gt lt para gt lt table gt lt table gt lt pto_header gt indent lt indent left lin gt lt gt lt gt lt table gt lt table gt lt indent gt fixedSize lt fixedSize width lin height 1cm lt para gt lt para gt lt table gt lt table gt lt fixedSize gt Graphical
20. gt lt blockTextColor colorName black gt lt This sets a textColor for the first row gt lt Since it comes after the above setting gt lt it overides it for this row gt lt blockTextColor colorName white start 0 0 stop 3 0 gt lt This sets textColor a column also overiding gt lt the first textColor setting for this row gt lt blockTextColor colorName blue start 1 1 stop 1 6 gt lt This sets a background color for the first row gt lt blockBackground colorName red start 0 0 stop 3 0 gt lt This sets a background color for the rest of the table gt lt blockBackground colorName cornsilk start 0 1 stopz 1 1 lt This sets a background color for an individual cell gt lt This has to go AFTER the above blockBackground gt otherwise it would overpainted by the cornsilk color gt lt blockBackground colorName lightcoral start 3 3 stop 3 3 gt lt blockTableStyle gt lt stylesheet gt lt story gt lt title gt Example 10 colors and fonts in tables lt title gt spacer length 1cm gt lt blockTable style myBlockTableStyle rowHeights 3 5cm 2cm 2cm 2cm 2cm 2cm 2cm colWidths 4cm 4cm 4cm 4cm gt lt tr gt lt td gt Cell 0 0 lt td gt lt td gt Cell 1 0 lt td gt lt td gt Cell 2 0 lt td gt lt td gt Cell 3 0 lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt Cell 0 1 lt td gt lt td gt
21. lt para gt lt para gt lt i gt MDLE MIDDLE for VA in cells 3 2 and 3 3 lt i gt lt para gt lt story gt lt document gt Page 83 of 123 Revision 1 16 RML User Guide Example 11 lines and alignment in tables a LEFT VA TOP VA TOP VA TOP Revision 1 16 RIGHT VAZTOP a LEFT 1 1 Cell 2 1 VA MIDDLE a LEFT 1 2 VA MIDDLE a LEFT 1 3 a LEFT 1 4 2 4 a LEFT 1 5 2 5 a LEFT 1 6 2 6 Figure 47 Output table from EXAMPLE 11 a value for blockAlignment VA value for blockValign MDLE MIDDLE for VA in cells 3 2 and 3 3 Page 84 of 123 a RIGHT VA MDL a RIGHT VA MDL a RIGHT a RIGHT a RIGHT a RIGHT RML User Guide Revision 1 16 11 4 Example 12 images and padding in tables This example shows images in a table and the way to use the various padding attributes For comparison purposes The cells that contain pictures in this table are all 166 pixels in height and 161 pixels in width Where padding is used it has a value of 20 pixels horizontally or 40 pixels vertically EXAMPLE 12 lt xml version 1 0 encoding iso 8859 1 standalone no gt lt DOCTYPE document SYSTEM rml 1 0 dtd lt document filename example_12 pdf gt lt template gt lt pageTemplate id main gt lt pageGraphics gt lt pageGraphics gt frame id first x1 72 1 72 width 451 height 698 gt lt pageTemplate gt lt template gt
22. width 177 height 552 25 fill no stroke yes gt fill color green gt lt stroke color black gt lt ellipse 247 yz 382 25 width 347 height 552 25 fill yes stroke no gt lt fill color blue gt lt stroke color black gt lt ellipse 417 yz 382 25 width 507 height 552 25 fill yes stroke yes gt lt fill color black gt lt drawCentredString x 127 5 y 357 gt Ellipse with stroke but no fill drawCentredString lt drawCentredString 297 5 yz 357 Ellipse with fill but no stroke drawCentredString drawCentredString 467 5 yz 357 Ellipse with both stroke and fill drawCentredString rect 84 5 y 214 3 width 1 in height 1 15 in fill no stroke yes gt fill color green gt stroke color black gt rect 254 5 y 214 3 width 1 in height 1 15 in fill yes stroke no gt fill color blue gt stroke color black gt rect x 424 5 yz 214 3 width 1 in height 1 15 in fill yes stroke yes fill color black gt drawCentredString x 127 5 199 1 gt Rect with stroke but no fill drawCentredString drawCentredString 297 5 y 199 1 gt Rect with fill but no stroke drawCentredString drawCentredString x 467 5 199 1 gt Rect with both stroke and fill drawCentredString rect 84 5 56 5 width 1 in height 1 15 in
23. 10 colWidthse 50 90 35 11 gt lt tr gt u lt tr gt tr tr blockTable tr lt tr gt td td lt td gt lt td gt lt tr gt td Page 102 of 123 Revision 1 16 string required string required unformatted data string style name sequence of measurement sequence of measurement rows of same length RML User Guide td fontName Helvetica fontSize 12 tontColor red leading 12 leftPadding 3 rightPadding 3 topPadding 3 bottomPadding 3 background pink align right vAlign bottom gt string of string form or sequence of flowable lt td gt Paragraph like Elements para lt para style myfavoritstyle gt Paragraph text which may contain intraparagraph markup lt para gt title lt title style myfavoritstyle Paragraph text which may contain intraparagraph markup title Page 103 of 123 Revision 1 16 stringform font name stringform font size stringform font color stringform line spacing cell left padding cell right padding cell top padding cell bottom padding background color cell horizontal alignment vertical alignment string paragraph style name string paragraph style name RML User Guide hl lt 1 style myfavoritstyle Paragraph text which may contain intraparagraph markup lt h1 gt h2 lt h2 style myfavoritstyle gt Paragraph text which may contain i
24. 21cm 29 7cm or 595 842 for A4 8 5in 11in for letter and 8 5in 17in for legal leftMargin rightMargin set the horizontal margins for the page topMargin and bottomMargin setthe vertical margins for the page You can also set the title of the document with the title attribute which defaults to untitled and the author with the author attribute which defaults to unauthored There are also the optional showBoundary andallowSplitting attributes which can both be set to 0 or 1 or true and false The showBoundary attribute is off by default but when it is set to true it shows a black border around any frames on the page template allows you to set options for the whole document The lt pageTemplate gt tag allows you to set options for individual pages You can have more than one pageTemplate inside the template section This allows you to have different pageTemplates for each page that requires a different structure For example the title page of a report could have a number of graphics on it while the rest of the pages are more text orientated Each pageTemplate tag must have the mandatory attribute id This gives the template a name and allows both rml2pdf and you to refer to it by name As well as this required attribute you can put any number of lt pageGraphics gt intoa lt pageTemplate gt lt pageGraphics gt are the containers for the lt drawString gt and shape drawing commands we s
25. 6 thickness 1 gt lt blockTableStyle gt lt stylesheet gt lt story gt lt title gt Example 11 lines and alignment in tables lt title gt spacer length 1cm gt lt blockTable style myBlockTableStyle rowHeights 2cm 2cm 2cm 2cm 2cm 2cm 2cm colWidths 4cm 3cm 3cm 4cm gt tr td a LEFT VA TOP lt td gt td VA TOP td td VA TOP lt td gt lt td gt a RIGHT VA TOP lt td gt lt tr gt Page 82 of 123 RML User Guide Er td a LEFT lt td gt lt td gt 1 1 lt td gt lt td gt Cell 2 1 lt td gt lt td gt a RIGHT lt td gt lt tr gt trs td a LEFT lt td gt lt td gt 1 2 lt td gt lt td gt VA MIDDLE lt td gt td a RIGHT lt td gt lt tr gt tr td a LEFT lt td gt td 1 3 td td VA MIDDLE lt td gt td VA MDL a RIGHT lt td gt lt tr gt tr td a LEFT lt td gt lt td gt 1 4 lt td gt lt td gt 2 4 lt td gt td a RIGHT lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt a LEFT lt td gt lt td gt 1 5 lt td gt td 2 5 td td a RIGHT td tr tr td a LEFT lt td gt lt td gt 1 6 lt td gt td 2 6 td td a RIGHT lt td gt lt tr gt lt blockTable gt lt spacer length 15 gt lt para gt a value for lt i gt blockAlignment lt i gt lt para gt lt para gt VA value for lt i gt blockValign lt i gt
26. Cell 1 1 lt td gt lt td gt Cell 2 1 lt td gt lt td gt Cell 3 1 lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt Cell 0 2 lt td gt lt td gt Cell 1 2 lt td gt lt td gt Cell 2 2 lt td gt lt td gt Cell 3 2 lt td gt lt tr gt Page 77 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 tr td Cell 0 3 td td Cell 1 3 td td Cell 2 3 td td Cell 3 3 td tr lt tr gt lt td gt Cell 0 4 td td Cell 1 4 td td Cell 2 4 lt td gt lt td gt Cell 3 4 td tr lt tr gt lt td gt Cell 0 5 td td Cell 1 5 td td Cell 2 5 lt td gt lt td gt Cell 3 5 td tr tr td Cell 0 6 td td Cell 1 6 td td Cell 2 6 td td Cell 3 6 td tr lt blockTable gt lt story gt lt document gt Page 78 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 Example 10 colors and fonts in tables Cell 0 1 Cell 1 1 Cell 2 1 Cell 3 1 Cell 0 2 Cell 1 2 Cell 2 2 Cell 3 2 Cell 0 3 Cell 1 3 Cell 2 3 Cell 0 4 Cell 1 4 Cell 2 4 Cell 3 4 Cell 0 5 Cell 1 5 Cell 2 5 Cell 3 5 Cell 0 6 Cell 1 6 Cell 2 6 Cell 3 6 Figure 45 Output table from EXAMPLE 10 Page 79 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 11 2Colors and fonts in table cells As an alternative to specifying cell properties using block table styles RML also allows some cell styles to be specified as attributes of the td tag lt blockTable colWidths 5cm 5cm style myBlockTableStylel lt tr gt lt td gt fontName lt td gt
27. Drawing Operations drawString lt drawString y 7in gt text to draw or string forms drawString Page 108 of 123 measurement measurement measurement measurement measurement measurement Revision 1 16 Only in PTO Sequence of top level flowables optional optional Sequence of top level flowables optional optional Sequence of top level flowables required required RML User Guide drawRightString drawRightString Ae 7 gt text to draw or string forms lt drawRightString gt drawCentredString lt drawCentredString y 7in gt text to draw or string forms drawCentredString drawCenteredString lt drawCenteredString pg gt synonym for drawCentredString drawCenteredString ellipse Kellipse xe lin y Tin width 5cm height 3cm fill true stroke false gt measurement measurement measurement measurement measurement measurement measurement measurement measurement measurement truth value truth value Page 109 of 123 Revision 1 16 required required required required required required required required required required RML User Guide circle circle y Jin radius 3cm fill true stroke false gt rect lt rect x lin y Jain width 5cm height 3cm round 1 2cm fill true stroke
28. boxStrokeColor blue fontName Times Bold fontSize 14 label textfancy textbox gt some text lt textBox gt labeled textbox colorful textbox bold textbox textfancy textbox NN P 7 The following code creates a row of sample textboxes illustrating the auto resizing text feature lt textBox x 0cm y 0cm boxWidth 3cm boxHeight 1cm fontSize 14 label no resizing gt some text lt textBox gt lt textBox x 3 5cm y 0cm boxWidth 3cm boxHeight 1cm fontSize 14 label horiz resizing gt some more text lt textBox gt lt textBox 7 boxWidth 3cm boxHeight 1cm shrinkToFit 1 fontSize 14 label vert resizing gt some text some text some text lt textBox gt lt textBox x 10 5cm y 0cm boxWidth 3cm boxHeight 1cm shrinkToFit 1 fontSize 14 label horiz vert resizing gt some more text some text some text some text lt textBox gt no resizing horiz resizing vert resizing horiz vert resizing some more text some text some text some text ee text some text text Page 50 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 Letterboxes Letterboxes are intended for single line text fields where each letter is contained in a subcell clearly seperated from neighbouring cells This is often seen on official forms where people are expected to write letters of a word at predefined positions RML provides such letterboxes too and they behave mostly like textbox
29. can either come to a point or the vertex can be rounded or squared off into a bevelled join The possible values for join are round mitered or bevelled The cap attribute to lt lineMode gt adjusts how the ends of lines appear The end of a line can have a square end exactly at the vertex a square end that is extended so it is over the vertex or a half circle a rounded cap These possible values for cap are default square or round T default cap round cap square Figure 29 Example of lineMode attribute Both the join and cap attributes for 1ineMode are only really visible if the line you are applying them to is thick Page 20 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 Another attribute to lt lineMode gt is dash This allows you to specify if the line is dotted or dashed You supply it a series of numbers separated by commas and it takes them as a pattern for how many pixels the line is on for and then how many pixels the line is off i e not displayed for This can be a simple pattern such as 1 2 which gives you a plain dotted line or 5 5 which makes the lines sections equal with the spaces or as complex as 1 1 3 3 1 4 4 1 a complex pattern of dots and dashes SF ELE E E 28 Mom ER E x TN I Li 4 i wv dash z 55 dash z 2 10 dash 5 5 2 10 Figure 30 Example of lineMode attribute dash The following example shows examples of most of the attributes that
30. can t have auto width then this is the thing to check you have probably omitted the rowHeights orcolWidths When you are using paragraphs inside a table you must not put any text outside the lt para gt lt para gt tags The only exception to this rule is whitespace you can put spaces and tabs outside the para tag but nothing else One other thing to be aware of is that if you usea para inside a table it will ignore the text attributes you have used for that table and instead use the attributes for paragraphs This can be a plus since it allows you to use already defined paragraph styles but can take you by surprise if weren t expecting it Page 73 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 As an example here is the RML that generated the above table lt blockTable rowHeights 1 25cm 1 25cm colWidths 4cm 4cm gt lt tr gt lt td gt lt para gt This is a lt b gt more lt b gt complex lt font color red gt blocktable lt font gt lt para gt lt td gt lt td gt lt para gt This is a more lt i gt complex lt i gt blocktable lt para gt lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt lt para gt lt font face Helvetica gt This is a more complex blockTable lt font gt lt para gt lt td gt lt td gt lt para gt This is lt greek gt a lt greek gt more lt font color blue gt lt i gt complex lt i gt lt font gt blockta lt greek gt b lt greek gt le lt para gt lt td g
31. chapter and section RML provides several features that support cross referencing and page number calculations The name and NamedString tags allow forward referencing and the evalString tag allows computations of page numbers or other computations inside an RML text Furthermore these techniques may be combined with preprocessing methods such as XSL the C preprocessor or the Preppy preprocessor to allow the convenient construction of structures such as tables of contents indices or bibliographies 9 1 the namedString tag and forward references The namedString tagissimilarto the name tag it associates a name to a string of text The namedString tagis more general than the name tag in the sense that it allows other string constructs such as getName in the named text For example the following snippet associates the name Introduction with the current page number at the time of formatting namedString id Introduction The Introduction starts at pageNumber namedString The name tag does not permit other tags inside the string it names in this manner Elsewhere the RML text may substitute the page number for the introduction using the construct name id Introduction default this is a default placeholder used if Introduction is undefined and this reference to the Introduction name may occur before the Introduction name is defined For example the reference may occur at the beginning of the document in the Table
32. gt lt The story starts below this comment gt story lt title gt Example 9 lt title gt lt para gt This is a page which shows you how illustrations grids and the place tag work lt para gt lt illustration width 90 height 90 gt lt fill color red gt circle x 45 y 45 radius 30 fill yes setFont name Times Roman size 8 gt drawString x 0 y 0 gt This is illustration lt drawString gt illustration para The red circle you can see is an lt i gt illustration lt i gt not a lt i gt pageGraphic lt i gt para illustration width 75 heightz 75 fill color teal circle x 30 yz 30 radius 30 fill yes stroke color darkslategray gt grid xs 15 30 45 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 gt illustration para So is the teal colored one Page 69 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 para para These are all flowables in the story para story document 10 12 spacer spacer is another tag which does just what the name suggests A spacer inserts an empty element into the page to force other elements downwards or sideways The spacer tag has two attributes length is mandatory and refers to the length down the page and width is optional Example To produce a spacer 15 points in height and one inch wide you could do the following spacer length 15 width 72 10 13 Form and d
33. is storage data If you have full production versions of both RML2PDF and PageCatcher you can use the lt catchForms gt tag to import all forms from a PageCatcher storage file for use in your RML document Example This example takes the form called PFO a page caught by PageCatcher and stored in the file storage data and draws it into your document as a page backdrop lt pageDrawing gt lt catchForms storageFile storage data gt lt doForm name PFO lt pageDrawing gt The lt catchForms gt tag is a drawing operation and can occur anywhere in your RML document where a lt doForm gt tag can occur For example you can use a catchForms inside the flow of a story by using it inside an illustration The lt catchForms gt tag has one mandatory argument storageFile which gives the name of the PageCatcher storage file to extract the form from One small point to remember is that if you are using multiple forms from the same data file you only need to use the actual lt catchForms gt tag once To actually put the captured data into your document you would use multiple instances of the lt doForm gt tag Notice how this works in the example below illustration width 451 height 698 gt lt pageGraphics gt lt catchForms storageFile samples data gt lt doForm name PFO lt pageGraphics gt lt illustration gt lt illustration width 451 height 698 gt lt pageGraphics gt lt doForm na
34. lt drawCentredString x 3 in y 3 75 in gt width 2 dash 5 5 lt drawCentredString gt lt lineMode width 2 dash 2 10 gt lt lines gt 4in 4 5in 5in 4 5in 5in 4 5in 4 5in 4in 4 5in 4in 4 5in 4 75in lt lines gt lt drawCentredString x 4 5 in y 3 75 in gt width 2 dash 2 10 lt drawCentredString gt lt lineMode width 2 dash 5 5 2 10 gt lt lines gt 5 5in 4 5in 6 5in 4 5in 6 5in 4 5in 6in 4in 6in 4in 6in 4 75in lt lines gt lt drawCentredString x 6 in y 3 75 in gt width 2 dash 5 5 2 10 lt drawCentredString gt geGraphics gt frame id first x1 72 1 72 width 451 height 698 gt lt pa lt templa lt stylesh lt styles lt story gt geTemplate gt te gt eet gt heet gt lt para gt lt para gt lt story gt docume nt Page 24 of 123 1 16 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 Lines in RML TT Figure 31 Output from EXAMPLE 4 Page 25 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 5 Graphics vs Flowables Both the basic graphical figures and the basic text operations we have seen so far share some properties All of them require you to specifically position them at a certain point on a page or inside a frame using co ordinates In RML operations which position elements explicitly on the page using X Y co ordinates and other geometric parameters are called graphics operations or just graphics The other major group of
35. lt td fontName Courier gt Courier lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt fontName lt td gt lt td fontName Helvetica gt Helvetica lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt fontSize lt td gt lt td fontSize 8 gt 8 lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt fontSize lt td gt lt td fontSize 14 gt 14 lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt fontColor lt td gt lt td fontColor red gt red lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt fontColor lt td gt lt td fontColor blue gt blue lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt leading lt td gt lt td leading 16 gt leading is 16 lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt leading lt td gt lt td leading 12 gt leading is 12 lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt leftPadding lt td gt lt td leftPadding 10 gt 10 lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt leftPadding lt td gt lt td leftPadding 16 gt 16 lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt rightPadding lt td gt lt td rightPadding 10 align right gt 10 lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt rightPadding lt td gt lt td rightPadding 24 align right gt 24 lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt topPadding lt td gt lt td topPadding 10 gt 10 lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt topPadding lt td gt lt td topPadding 24 gt 24 lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt bottomPadding lt td gt lt td bottomPadding 10 gt 10 lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt bottomPadding lt td gt lt td bottomPadding 24
36. measurement required measurement required string font name fontsize measurement string color name measurement measurement string color name string color name string color name measurement string string string truth value truth value string file name string file name RML User Guide Revision 1 16 letterBoxes lt letterBoxes gt style myboxstyle x lin y lin count 10 Label label text labelFontName Helvetica labelFontSize 12 labelTextColor blue labeloffsetx lin labelOffsetY lin boxWidth 1in boxHeight lin combHeight 0 25 box5trokeColor blue boxFillColor blue lineWidth lin fontName Helvetica fontSize 12 box contents goes here lt letterBoxes gt textBox Page 114 of 123 string box style name measurement required measurement required integer required string string font name fontsize measurement string color name measurement measurement measurement measurement float string color name string color name measurement string font name fontsize measurement unformatted data RML User Guide textBox style myboxstyle boxWidth lin boxHeight lin labelFontName Helvetica labelFontSize 12 labelTextColor blue labelOffsetX lin labelOffsetY lin boxStrokeColor blue boxFillColor blue textColor blue lineWidth 2 lin fontName Helvetica fontSize 12 align left shr
37. parse it or process it in any way just display it CDATA section is started with the characters lt CDATA and is closed off with the characters gt It can appear inside any flowable though it is most useful inside a pre tag CDATA may be useful in places where you have large quantities of and gt characters that you want to display in your PDF and that you would rather not have to convert them all to amp 1t amp gt entities Quoting sections of RML XML or HTML code is an example of a good place to use CDATA if you needed to revise the code example at a later date you would have to convert the characters in every tag into entities CDATA saves you having to do this However you should only use CDATA when necessary If you are using other XML tools they will also ignore anything inside a CDATA section Page 44 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 Example lt pre gt lt CDATA Anything could go here lt non_existant_tags gt amp signs Whatever you want RML ignores it 11 gt lt pre gt 8 7 Plug ins plugInGraphic and plugInFlowable Both plugInGraphics and plugInFlowables allow you to use objects from outside your RML document plugInGraphic AplugInGraphic identifies a function callable in a module which takes a canvas and a data string as arguments and presumably draws something on the canvas using information in the data string Example lt plugInGraphic m
38. red translate dxz 55 91 gt drawString x 0 y 0 gt X lt drawString gt lt illustration gt 10 5 scaling lt scale gt as its name suggests allows you to stretch or shrink a graphic The scale tag takes two optional attributes sx sy sx is how much to scale the X axis and sy is how much to scale the Y axis The scaling does not have to be proportional omitting one allows you to change the scaling in one direction only And you can shrink the shape as well as scale it up an sx or sy of 2 doubles the size of it but an sx or sy of 0 5 halves it Scale factors can also be negative Using an sx of 1 and an sy of produces a mirror image Examples lt scale sx 2 sy 0 25 gt lt scale sx 2 gt lt scale sy 0 5 gt This is what a scale with a sx of 2 and sy of 2 looks like Original sx 2 sy 2 Figure 38 An example of the lt scale gt tag in use Page 64 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 10 6 rotations The rotate tag allows allows you to rotate a graphic rotate takes one mandatory attributes called degrees which is the number of degrees to rotate the object A positive number for degrees rotates it anti clockwise a negative number rotates it clockwise When using rotate objects are rotated around the current origin If you want to rotate a specific element ofapageGraphic orillustration you will have to usea translate to move the origin be
39. seg tags you need to use the id attribute para lt h2 gt lt i gt Better use of seq lt i gt lt h2 gt lt para gt Page 41 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 lt seqDefault id test gt We have just done a amp lt seqDefault id test amp gt para para lt seqReset id test We have just done a amp lt seqReset id test amp gt para spacer length 6 gt para First seq seq id test para para Second seq seq id test para spacer length 6 gt para lt seqReset id test We have just done a amp lt seqReset id test amp gt para spacer lengthz 6 para First seq after seqReset seq id test para para second seq after seqReset seq id test para lt h2 gt lt i gt Using two seqs independently lt i gt lt h2 gt lt para gt lt seqReset id testOne gt We have just done a amp lt seqReset id testOne amp gt para para lt seqReset id testTwo We have just done a amp lt seqReset id testTwo amp gt para spacer length 6 gt para First seq for testOne seq id testOne para para Second seq for testOne seq id testOne para spacer length 6 gt para First seq for testTwo seq id testTwo para para Second seq for testTwo seq id testTwo para spacer length 6 gt para
40. tag Between these two tags you can a number of things e You have a list of pairs of X Y co ordinates If this is the case a straight line is drawn to each point in turn e You can have a paired lt moveto gt lt moveto gt tag If this is the case you need to give an x y co ordinate pair between these two tags The pen or brush then moves to this point and any further points or instructions given after this while still inside the path tag continue onwards from this new point e You can have a paired lt curvesto gt lt curvesto gt tag This is similar to both the curves tag and the lt moveto gt tag discussed above Inside the pair of lt curvesto gt tags you need to give rml2pdf sets of 3 pairs of X Y co ordinates at a time Like lt curves gt lt curvesto gt creates a Bezier curve However since it is inside a path object it already knows one of the points the start point is assumed to be the last point in the path before the curvesto tag In other words the pen or brush is already in a position and this is taken as the first point for your Bezier curve Here is an example of how a path looks in action Page 60 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 The stroke isn t completed here since used a moveto Figure 36 The output from EXAMPLE 7 EXAMPLE 7a lt xml version 1 0 encoding iso 8859 1 standalone no gt lt DOCTYPE document SYSTEM rml 1 O dt
41. tags in RML are the flowables Flowables like paragraphs spacers and tables can appear story orinthe place tag Graphics appear in lt pageGraphics gt and illustration These two categories cannot be mixed flowables are positioned in sequence running down a frame until the frame has no more room and then placed on the next frame on the next page if necessary graphics are explicitly positioned by co ordinates Page 26 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 6 More about pages and page structures 6 1 More about template and pageTemplate We have already seen that the template has to appear at the start of an RML document after the prolog This section sets out to explain it more fully A template is the section where the layout of a document is set out both for the whole document and for individual pages within it Up to now we have just been using template without any options But the template tag has a number of optional attributes that you can use to set settings for the whole document pageSize sets the size of the page This takes a pair of numbers for the width and the height of the page If you don t give it any numbers it defaults to A4 the international standard page size which differs from the American standard page size of letter but is a standard in other places such as the UK While this is a sensible default it s usually best to explicitly specify a size Common sizes are
42. to print can produce PDF files this means that a ReportLab document can include graphical elements created by virtually any program These imported elements can be combined freely with text or graphics drawn directly into the document For example an application can import pages from a government tax form and draw text in the spaces provided to fill in the form The resulting document can then be combined with a cover letter at the beginning and supporting tabular data at the end all in a single PDF document 1 2 Installation and Use RML2PDF is available in several formats RML2PDF as a stand alone executable for 32 bit Windows This version is purely provided for evaluation purposes Potential users can use this copy to evaluate the product for possible use Please remember that since this standalone version requires no installation step it is not as efficient as a licensed installation in particular a licensed version will run somewhat faster RML2PDF as a licensed executable compiled for each operating system platform These versions provide simple installation that is easy to maintain and upgrade appropriate for those users who do not need to use the programming API but only wish to use RML2PDF as a stand alone program Page 5 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 RML2PDF as a Python programming language module These versions provide both a command line interface and a programmable API interface and may be used as a compone
43. you need this nextFrame to kick you into the next normal page and continue with your document normally Look in section 7 6 Using multiple frames for more info on the nextFrame and setNextTemplat tags Look at the file testVtest 016 pagecatcher rml for an example of this tag in use Page 47 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 8 9 Outlines The outlineAdd adds an outline entry to your document It can go in either graphics or in a story Assigning outline levels to parts of your document such as paragraphs allows you to build up a hierarchical structure for your document outlineAdd has two optional attributes level and closed The level specifies how deep in the outline the entry appears The default level is 0 closed if set hides any children of this outline entry by default Closed takes Boolean arguments Example lt outlineAdd gt First outline entry lt outlineAdd gt lt outlineAdd level 1 gt sub entry lt outlineAdd gt lt outlineAdd closed true gt Second outline entry 2 lt outlineAdd gt lt outlineAdd level 1 gt sub entry 2 lt outlineAdd gt A note about levels in order to add a level 3 outline entry the previous outline entry must be at least level 2 2 3 4 In other words you can move back any number of levels but you can only move forward one level at a time 8 10 Form field tags An important class of reports contains lots of fields to be traditionally filled in manually by use
44. 0 5in 6in 10in 6in 10in 6in 10 75in lines drawCentredString x 6 in yz 9 75 in gt width 15 drawCentredString lt examples for the join attribute to LineMode gt lt lineMode width 5 gt lt lines gt lin 9in 2in 9in 2in 9in 1 5in 8 5in 1 5in 8 51 1 5in 9 25in lines fill color black gt lt setFont name Helvetica size 9 gt lt drawCentredString x 1 5 in y 8 25 in gt width 10 lt drawCentredString gt lt options for join are round mitered or bevelled gt lt lineMode width 5 join round gt lt lines gt 2 5in 9in 3 5in 9in 3 5in 9in 3in 8 5in 3in 8 5in 3in 9 25in lt lines gt lt drawCentredString x 3 in y 8 25 in gt width 5 join round lt drawCentredString gt lt lineMode width 5 join mitered gt lt lines gt 4in 9in 5in 9in 5in 9in 4 5in 8 5in 4 5in 8 5in 4 5in 9 25in lt lines gt lt drawCentredString x 4 5 in y 8 25 in gt width 5 join mitered lt drawCentredString gt lt lineMode width 5 join bevelled gt lt lines gt 5 5in 9in 6 5in 9in 6 5in 9in 6in 8 5in 6in 8 5in 6in 9 25in lt lines gt lt drawCentredString x 6 in y 8 25 in gt width 5 join bevelled lt drawCentredString gt lt examples for the attribute to LineMode gt lineMode width 10 lt lines gt lin 7 5in 2in 7 5in 2in 7 5in 1 5in 7in l 5in 7in 1 5in 7 75in lines fill color
45. 1 0 encoding iso 8859 1 standalone no gt lt DOCTYPE document SYSTEM rml 1 0 gt document filename example 3 pdf template lt pageTemplate id main gt lt pageGraphics gt lt set the font and fill colour for the title gt fill color red setFont name Helvetica size 24 gt lt Use drawCentredString to place a title on the page gt drawCentredString x 297 5 y 800 gt Simple Text and Graphics with RML lt drawCentredString gt fill color red gt lt look at the output though a fill color is set no fill gt is produced since fill is set to no for the circle gt circle 127 5 yz 672 75 radius 1 in fill no stroke yes fill color green gt stroke color black gt circle 297 5 yz 672 75 radius 1 in fill yes stroke no fill color blue gt stroke color black gt circle 467 5 yz 672 75 radius 1 in fill yes stroke yes fill color black gt Page 17 of 123 RML User Guide setFont name Helvetica size 9 drawCentredString x 127 5 yz 567 5 Circle with stroke but no fill drawCentredString drawCentredString 297 5 yz 567 5 Circle with fill but no stroke drawCentredString drawCentredString 467 5 yz 567 5 Circle with both stroke and fill drawCentredString fill color red lt ellipse 77 y 382 25
46. 2 We have just done a lt seqReset id testOne gt First seq after seqReset for testOne 1 second seq after seqReset for testOne 2 First seq after seqReset for testT wo 3 second seq after seqReset for testTwo 4 Notice how resetting testOne doesn t affect testTwo at all Figure 33 The output from EXAMPLE 6 One more sophisticated use for using these tags is for multiple page counters If you have a document where you need different sections numbered separately from the main body of a document perhaps for introductory matter such as the contents and preface of a book this can be done with a named seq tag Page 43 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 The page counter as used by the pageNumber tag is a unique value which depends on the actual physical number of pages If rather than using a pageNumber tag you instead use something like seq id pageCounter gt you have the ability to use lt seqReset id pageCounter gt in between sections so that each chapter has pages numbered from the start of that chapter rather than the start of the document If you use a different template for each chapter this can then give you page numbers in the format 1 12 rather than just 12 where you are on page 12 of the document which is page 12 of chapter 1 8 4 Entities In example 6 we saw our first use of entities In RML you can t use the characters lt gt or amp inside any display elements such as drawString
47. 5in 6in 3 5in 6in 3in 5 5in 3in 5 5in 3in 6 25in lines drawCentredString x 3 in yz 5 25 in gt width 5 join mitered drawCentredString drawCentredString x 3 in yz 5 1 gt miterLimit 10 drawCentredString lt lineMode width 10 join mitered gt lt lines gt 4in 6in 5in 6in 5in 6in 4 5in 5 5in 4 5in 5 5in 4 5in 6 25in lt lines gt lt drawCentredString x 4 5 in y 5 25 in gt width 10 join mitered lt drawCentredString gt lt lineMode width 10 join mitered miterLimit 20 gt lt lines gt 5 5in 6in 6 5in 6in 6 5in 6in 6in 5 5in 6in 5 5in 6in 6 25in lt lines gt lt drawCentredString x 6 in y 5 25 in gt width 10 join mitered lt drawCentredString gt Page 23 of 123 gt Revision 1 16 RML User Guide lt pa Revision lt drawCentredString x 6 in y 5 1 in gt miterLimit 20 lt drawCentredString gt lt examples for the dash attribute to LineMode gt lt lineMode width 2 gt lt lines gt lin 4 5in 2in 4 5in 2in 4 5in 1 5in 4in 1 5in 4in 1 5in 4 75in lt lines gt lt fill color black gt lt setFont name Helvetica size 9 gt lt drawCentredString x 1 5 in y 3 75 in gt width 2 lt drawCentredString gt lt options for dash are sequences of numbers gt lt lineMode width 2 dash 5 5 gt lt lines gt 2 5in 4 5in 3 5in 4 5in 3 5in 4 5in 3in 4in 3in 4in 3in 4 75in lt lines gt
48. 9 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 Unlike other dialects of XML RML does not allow you to provide relative paths to the DTD nor a full URL It must always be the name of the DTD which must live in the same directory as the exe or python program rml2pdf This makes it easy to predict where the RML DTD will be and prevents you using an old DTD that happens to be sitting around your disk somewhere It also allows us to make sure that when you create a file with RML the PDF document will be created in the same directory as the RML file and to allow relative pathnames in the document tag The prolog section is common to all XML documents In addition to this RML requires another line following the prolog lt document filename outfile pdf This line gives the name that you want the output PDF file created with This line also starts the document proper and must be matched by a lt document gt tag as the last line in the document in the same way that an HTML file is bracketed by lt HTML gt lt HTML gt The filename you give can just be a simple filename a relative path eg myDoc pdf will create it in the directory two levels up from the one your RML document is in or a full pathname eg C output_files pdf myProject myDocument pdf or tmp userl myScratchFile pdf If you just supply a filename the output file will be created in the same directory as your RML file The same principle works with anywhere els
49. B Glossary of terms and abbreviations 95 Appendix C Letters used by the Greek tag 98 Appendix D Command reference 99 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 Page 4 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 1 Introduction 1 1 The ReportLab Enterprise Reporting Solution ReportLab s solution solves several central problems that ebusinesses face in creating publishing caliber reports that are customized produced in real time in volume and platform independent Existing reporting tools are limited to database reports are typically Windows based have problematic restrictions on layout and graphic design and go straight to a printer More complex publishing systems involve pipelines of applications which are simply too unwieldy for real time use in large scale environments ReportLab s product suite allows direct creation of rich PDF reports on web or application servers in real time The tools run on any platform can actively acquire data from any source XML flat files databases COM Corba Java place no limits on the output and facilitate electronic delivery and archival The ReportLab suite lets you define your own business rules to automatically create custom online reports catalogs business forms and other documents RML2PDF is a central component of the toolkit a translator which converts high level XML markup into PDF documents Report Markup Language describes the precise layout of a printed document and RML2PDF c
50. Performs arithmetic calculations subtractions using the current page number and a forward reference to the LASTPAGENO which is presumably defined on the last page In the context of this document the paragraph evaluates to the following The last page is 123 One less than that is 122 The current page is 57 And there are 66 pages to go An RML document can make use of arbitrary arithmetic calculations using the evalString tag but in practice addition and subtraction over page numbers the most useful 9 4 Generated RML Although the name namedString getName andevalString tags can be used to build tables of contents and indices it is not easy to directly edit RML documents that includes cross reference structures of this kind For example to directly add a new section to the this document in RML text it would be necessary to add a new table of contents entry at the top something like this para style contents2 gt getName id chapterNumber seq id sectionNumber Installation para As well as the text of the section itself condPageBreak height 144 gt lt h2 gt lt getName id chapterNumber gt lt seq id sectionNumber gt Installation and Use h2 outlineAdd level 2 gt Installation and Use lt outlineAdd gt Page 57 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 para RML2PDF is available in several formats etcetera para And unless the creator takes great
51. Revision 1 16 left right or center integer integer measurement required integer integer measurement required integer integer measurement required integer integer measurement required integer integer RML User Guide Revision 1 16 blockBackground blockBackground colorName indigo string required start 4 integer stop 11 integer gt blockValign lt blockValign value left top middle or bottom start 4 integer stop 11 integer gt lineStyle lineStyle kind BOX line command required thickness 4 measurement required colorName magenta string required start 4 integer stop 11 integer gt The line command names are GRID BOX OUTLINE INNERGRID LINEBELOW LINEABOVE LINEBEFORE and LINEAFTER BOX and OUTLINE are equivalent and GRID is the equivalent of applying both BOX and INNERGRID Page Layout Tags pageTemplate lt pageTemplate id frontpage string required gt lt pageGraphics gt lt pageGraphics gt optional 1 or 2 lt frame gt one or more lt pageTemplate gt Page 121 of 123 RML User Guide frame frame gt id left xicciig yi Tia width 50cm height 90cm Special Tags name name gt alias alias gt getName getName gt color color gt id chapterName value Introduction id footerstring value chapterName id footerString id footerStri
52. ables Each one shows a page with the RML listing followed by a separate page with the result of that table Each listing contains comments to point out what each tag involved with the blockTable is doing Page 76 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 11 1 Example 10 Colors and fonts in tables This example show various ways of setting the text color DlockText Color font blockFont and background color b lockBackground for regions in a blockTable Notice the various ways of specifying a region within the table Also notice the way we have defined heights for the rows and widths for the columns in the blocktable tag EXAMPLE 10 lt xml version 1 0 encoding iso 8859 1 standalone no gt lt DOCTYPE document SYSTEM rml 1 O dtd document filename example 10 gt template lt pageTemplate id main gt lt pageGraphics gt lt pageGraphics gt frame id first x1 72 1 72 width 451 height 698 gt lt pageTemplate gt lt template gt lt stylesheet gt lt blockTableStyle id myBlockTableStyle gt lt This sets a font for every cell from the start of the gt lt second row down to the bottom right hand corner gt lt blockFont name Courier Bold start 0 1 stopz 1 1 This sets a font for the first row gt lt blockFont name Helvetica BoldOblique size 24 start 0 0 stop 3 0 gt This sets textColor for all the text in the table
53. ader on to your server Editor s note at 28 12 2002 there is a great deal of information on fonts which needs adding to this manual including embedded Type I fonts and encodings and use of embedded subsetted TrueType fonts Page 38 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 Part II Advanced Features Page 39 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 8 Miscellaneous useful features 8 1 pageNumber As you d expect from the name this tag adds page numbers to your document This has nothing tricky to remember all you have to do is put the pageNumber tag where you want the page number to appear 6 2 name and getName The name tag allows you to set a variable as you would in a programming language You can then retrieve this to put in another place by using the lt getName gt tag You can do this as many or as few times as you need so it is handy for things like headers and footers or for items that you see changing many times over the life of your document such as version or revision numbers If you set them using a name tag you only have to revise them in one place every time they change rather than having to plough through the document changing them manually in each location and inevitably missing one name has three attributes id and value are required but type is optional lt getName gt only has one attribute id and this is required so that it knows which name to yank In practice it would look s
54. age cmyk not implemented yet Page 13 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 3 3 Using fonts Font names are given in the following format Fontname style where fontname is the name of the font e g Courier and the style is its appearance eg Oblique BoldOblique The only fonts supplied with Adobe s Acrobat Reader are the 14 standard fonts RML does not currently support embedding fonts in a PDF document though it may do in the future These 14 standard fonts are Courier Courier Bold Courier BoldOblique Courier Oblique Helvetica Helvetica Bold Helvetica BoldOblique Helvetica Oblique Symbol Times Bold Times Boldltalic Times Italic Times Roman ZapfDingbats 3 4 Basic text operations setFont and drawString The simplest way to put text on a page is using the lt drawString gt tag This places the string of text on the page at the co ordinates you give it The only attributes you can give it are a pair of X and Y co ordinates After the tag itself comes the string of text you want put on the page and then you need the closing drawString tag DrawString hasa pairof companions DrawRightString and drawCentredString both work in the same way but right justify the string and center it respectively This is how they look in practice drawString x 523 y 800 gt This is a drawString example lt drawString gt lt drawRightString x 523 y 800 gt This is a drawRightString example lt dra
55. ame ina pageTemplate you must supply an id the X and Y co ordinates of the bottom left hand corner as well as the width andheight of the frame You can one frame in a page or use two or more to split it into a multi column layout Frames really come into their own when you use paragraphs and flowables see the section on Advanced text below This is how it looks in practice frame id main x1 4in yl 2in width 3in height 7in When you are using text in lt para gt lt para gt tags you can use the the lt nextFrame gt tag to force it into the next frame on the page Look at the section on Advanced text later in this document for more details on this An additional attribute overlapAttachedSpace canbesetto 0 or1 to force the frame to overlap space that is implicitly attached to flowables by their styles See section 6 5 on styles The default value for this attribute is set using the site wide configuration for reportlab in reportlab rl config py 6 3 condPageBreak conditional page breaks The condPageBreak isa CONDitional Page Break To use it you give it a height in any units that RML can handle It then compares this height with the remaining available space on a page If the space is sufficient then the next elements are placed on the current page but if there is less space than the height you have given it anything following the lt condPageBreak gt tag is continued on the next page That i
56. aphs are flowables This means that you don t need to tell RML exactly where every line is going to go on the page you let rml2pdf worry about that To do this you place your text inside the story section of an RML document and use the para and para tags to tell the parser where each paragraph starts and ends As well as delineating where paragraphs begin and end the para tag can also have a number of optional attributes style If you have set up a style in the stylesheet section of a document you can refer to them by name by using the style attribute For example if you have defined a style called Normal you have your paragraph appear in that style by using para style Normal alignment How the text is aligned within the paragraph It can be LEFT RIGHT CENTER or CENTRE or JUSTIFY fontName fontSize fontName and fontSize setthe name and size of the font that you want this paragraph displayed in This can often be better done using the paraStyle tag inside stylesheet and then using the style tag to apply it to that paragraph Example para fontName Helvetica fontSize 12 gt Page 31 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 leading leading is used is used to alter the space between lines In RML it is expressed as the height of a line PLUS the space between lines So if you are using 10 point font a leading of 15 will give you a space between lines of 5 po
57. aw earlier In practice you may have two lt pageGraphics gt sections inside a pageTemplate The way this is interperted by RML2PDF is that the first one is carried out before the contents of the story for that page and the second one is carried out after the story This may be of use when you need some elements to overlap others and particularly useful when you are using the lt includePdfPages gt tag IncludePdfPages places a number of pages imported from another PDF file into your document placing them over the content you already have including any header and footers you have designed This may mean it obscures headers footers or something else you need on very page The way around this is to place your headers and footers in a second pageGraphics section which ensures that it will appear over anything in your story Provided you have sensibly defined frames it won t appear over the main content of your page but it will appear over the top of your included PDFs allowing you to have the same look and feel for these pages as you do for the rest of your document See section 8 8 Integrating with PageCatcher catchForms doForm and includePdfPages for more info on the lt includePdfPages gt tag Page 27 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 6 2 Frame and nextFrame As well as containing lt pageGraphics gt each pageTemplate can also contain frames These frames can split the page into more than one region For each fr
58. awing lt pageDrawing gt lt drawString gt lt drawString gt lt place gt lt place gt lt pageDrawing gt pageGraphics lt pageGraphics gt lt drawString gt lt drawString gt lt place gt lt place gt lt pageGraphics gt Page 100 of 123 Revision 1 16 optional any number of styles Sequence of top level flowables required Sequence of graphical operations Sequence of graphical operations RML User Guide Generic Flowables Story Elements spacer spacer length 1 2in gt illustration illustration height 1 2in width 5in gt lt drawString gt lt drawString gt lt place gt lt place gt lt illustration gt pre lt pre style myfavoritestyle gt Preformatted Text lt pre gt xpre lt xpre style myfavoritestyle Paragraph text which may contain xpre Page 101 of 123 measurement measurement measurement measurement Revision 1 16 required required required Sequence of graphical operations string paragraph style name also string forms getname string paragraph style name intraparagraph markup RML User Guide plugInFlowable plugInFlowable module mymodule function myfunction gt string data for plug in plugInFlowable Table Elements blockTable lt blockTable style mytablestyle rowHeights 23 20 30
59. black gt lt setFont name Helvetica size 9 gt lt drawCentredString x 1 5 in y 6 75 in gt width 10 lt drawCentredString gt lt options for are default round or square gt lt lineMode width 10 cap default gt Page 22 of 123 RML User Guide lt lines gt 2 5in 7 5in 3 5in 7 5in 3 5in 7 5in 3in 7in Sin Jin 7 75in lines drawCentredString x 3 in yz 6 75 in width 10 cap default drawCentredString lt lineMode width 10 cap round gt lt lines gt 4in 7 5in 5in 7 5in 5in 7 5in 4 5in 7in 4 5in 7in 4 5in 7 75in lt lines gt lt drawCentredString x 4 5 in y 6 75 in gt width 10 cap round lt drawCentredString gt lt lineMode width 10 cap square gt lt lines gt 5 5in 7 5in 6 5in 7 5in 6 5in 7 5in 6in 7in 6in 7 6in 7 75in lt lines gt lt drawCentredString x 6 in y 6 75 in gt width 10 cap square lt drawCentredString gt lt lineMode width 5 cap default gt lt examples for the miterLimit attribute to LineMode lt lineMode width 5 join mitered gt lt lines gt lin 6in 2in 6in 2in 6in 1 5in 5 5in 1 51n 5 5in 1 5in 6 25in lines fill color black gt lt setFont name Helvetica size 9 gt lt drawCentredString x 1 5 in yz 5 25 in gt width 5 join mitered lt drawCentredString gt lt lineMode width 5 join mitered miterLimit 10 gt lt lines gt 2 5in 6in 3
60. bleStyle gt just blockTopPadding lt para gt lt td gt lt td gt lt para style paddingTableStyle gt lt b gt blockRightPadding lt b gt with lt b gt blockTopPadding lt b gt lt para gt lt td gt lt tr gt tr lt td gt lt illustration width 141 height 90 gt lt image file images replogo gif x 0 y 0 width 141 height 90 gt lt stroke color deepskyblue gt lt lineMode width 3 gt lt lines gt 0 0 141 0 141 0 141 90 141 90 0 90 09000 lt lines gt lt illustration gt lt td gt lt td gt lt illustration width 141 height 90 gt lt image file images replogo gif x 0 y 0 width 141 height 90 gt stroke color deepskyblue gt lt lineMode width 3 gt lt lines gt 0 0 141 0 141 0 141 90 141 90 0 90 09000 lt lines gt lt illustration gt lt td gt Page 87 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 lt td gt lt illustration width 141 height 90 gt lt image file images replogo gif x 0 y 0 width 141 height 90 gt lt stroke color deepskyblue gt lt lineMode width 3 gt lt lines gt 00 141 0 141 0 141 90 141 90 0 90 09000 lines illustration lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt lt para style paddingTableStyle gt blockLeftPadding with blockTopPadding lt para gt lt td gt lt td gt lt para style paddingTableStyle gt no padding lt para gt lt td gt lt td gt lt para style paddingTabl
61. care it may be necessary to adjust various section or chapter numbers in other entries as well To avoid this complexity this document is not directly written in RML per se but is written using a text preprocessor called preppy which automatically builds the table of contents and inserts the appropriate entries at the top while keeping track of chapter and section numbers For very complex documents using a preprocessor of some sort may be advisable Page 58 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 10 More graphics 10 1 curves We have seen how you can use the lines tag to create a number of straight lines with one command Not all the lines you want to draw will be straight which is why we havethe curves tag Like lines curves must appear in the pageGraphics section of your template Unlike lines you need to specify 4 points as X Y co ordinate pairs i e you need to feed curves sequences of 8 numbers at a time rather than the 4 you need for 1ines The curves tag produces a Bezier curve Bezier curves are named after the the French mathematician Pierre B zier and are curves that utilize at least three points to define a curve RML curves use the two endpoints or anchor points and two nodes Figure 35 A Bezier Curve In RML if you give a curve 4 control points which we shall call x1 y2 x2 y2 x3 y3 and x4 y4 the start point of the curve will be specified by x1 y1 and the endpoint s
62. cells as contained by the lt td gt and td tags can only contain one of two different sets of data Either a table cell can contain string forms text and the getName and pageNumber tags orit can contain a sequence of flowables tags such as lt gt lt gt and the various heading tags It is not possible to mix both of these forms in the same cell though you can mix them in the same table Putting strings into table cells is quicker than using paragraphs Paragraphs need to work out when to wrap text strings don t So you should avoid using paragraphs inside tables unless you really need to or you don t mind things slowing down When you are doing a big database report wherever possible use separate smaller tables to contain parts of your data rather than one huge table If you don t use many mini tables to contain small groups of rows but instead decide to do a big 1 000 row table you will notice a significant loss of speed in the generation of your output PDF This also makes it much easier to design complex grouped reports for each group header footer or detail block you can design one table style and keep them all independent of each other 11 5 Using block table styles Now that we have seen what the blockTable s attributes are and seen a summary of blockTableStyle here are some examples that show you how they can be used together The following few pages show a number of examples of blockT
63. center or justify string measurement measurement string string string string string string measurement left right or center string color name string measurement left right or center string color name string color name string color name measurement measurement required RML User Guide blockTableStyle blockTableStyle id mytablestyle gt lt blockFont gt lt blockLeading gt lt blockTableStyle gt Table Style Block Descriptors blockFont lt blockFont name TimesRoman size 8 leading 10 start 4 stop 11 gt blockLeading lt blockLeading length 10 start 4 stop 11 gt blockTextColor lt blockTextColor colorName pink start 4 stop 11 gt Page 119 of 123 string string measurement measurement integer integer measurement integer integer string integer integer Revision 1 16 table style block descriptors required required required User Guide blockAlignment lt blockAlignment value left start 4 stop 11 12 blockLeftPadding lt blockLeftPadding length 0 2in start 4 stop 11 gt blockRightPadding lt blockRightPadding length 0 2in start 4 staope ll blockBottomPadding lt blockBottomPadding length 0 2in start 4 stop 11 12 blockTopPadding blockTopPadding length 0 2in start 4 2 gt 120 123
64. cm 29 7cm leftMargin 2 5cm rightMargin 2 5cm topMargin 2 5cm bottomMargin 2 5cm title Example 5 templates and pageTemplates author Reportlab Inc Documentation Team showBoundary 1 allowSplitting 20 showBoundary means that we will be able to see the gt lt limits of frames gt lt pageTemplate id main gt lt pageGraphics gt lt pageGraphics gt frame id titleBox x1 2 5cm y1 27 7cm width 16cm height 1cm 2 frame id columnOne x1 2 5cm y1 2 5cm width 7 5cm heightz 24 7cm frame id columnTwo x1 l1cm y1 2 5cm width 7 5cm heightz 24 7cm pageTemplate template lt stylesheet gt lt initialize gt name id FileTitle value Example 5 templates and pageTemplates name id ColumnOneHeader value This is Column One name id ColumnTwoHeader value This is Column Two initialize lt paraStyle name titleBox fontName Helvetica Bold fontSize 18 spaceBefore 0 4 cm Page 34 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 alignment CENTER gt lt paraStyle name body fontName Helvetica fontSize 10 leftIndent 5 spaceAfter 5 gt lt stylesheet gt lt story gt lt para style titleBox gt lt b gt lt getName id FileTitle gt lt b gt lt para gt lt nextFrame gt lt condPageBreak height 144 gt lt h2 gt lt getName id ColumnOneHeader gt lt h2 gt lt para gt This is
65. cripts 32 7 6 Using multiple frames 33 7 1 Preformated text pre and xpre 33 7 8 Greek letters 34 7 9 Asian Fonts 37 Part II Advanced Features 39 8 Miscellaneous useful features 40 8 1 pageNumber 40 8 2 name and getName 40 8 3 Seq seqReset seqChain and SeqFormat 40 8 4 Entities 44 8 5 Aliases 44 8 6 CDATA unparsed character data 44 8 7 Plug ins plugInGraphic and plugInFlowable 45 8 8 Integrating with PageCatcher catchForms doForm and includePdfPages 46 8 9 Outlines 48 8 10 Form field tags 48 9 About Cross References and Page Numbers 56 9 1 the namedString tag and forward references 56 9 2 Multiple pass pdf formatting 56 9 3 Calculated Page Numbers evalString 57 9 4 Generated RML 57 10 More graphics 59 10 1 curves 59 10 2 paths 60 10 3 grids 63 10 4 Translations 63 10 5 scaling 64 10 6 rotations 65 10 7 Skew 66 10 8 Generic affine transforms 66 10 9 About scale rotate and skew 66 10 10 Bitmapped images 67 10 11 place and illustration 67 10 12 spacer 70 10 13 Form and doForm 70 10 14 Why use forms 71 Part III Tables 72 11 Using tables 73 11 1 Block tables 73 11 2 Block table attributes 74 11 3 Block table styles 75 11 4 More about block tables 76 11 5 Using block table styles 76 Appendix Colors recognized by RML 90 Appendix
66. d document filename example 7a pdf template lt pageTemplate id main gt lt pageGraphics gt lt fill color red gt lt stroke color black gt path x 247 yz 72 fill yes stroke yes close yes gt 247 172 147 172 147 272 247 272 247 372 347 372 347 372 347 272 447 272 447 172 347 172 347 72 lt This completes the first shape a red gt lt moveto gt 267 572 lt moveto gt lt This moves the pen position gt lt Notice that because we have used moveto the gt final line at the base of the cross is not completed even gt though the close attribute of the path tag is set to gt lt yes gt 277 612 this acts as the start point for the Bezier curves below gt Page 61 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 lt curvesto gt 147 585 147 687 297 792 447 687 447 585 317 612 lt curvesto gt 327 572 lt We don t need to give the last point because close is gt lt set to yes gt lt path gt lt pageGraphics gt lt frame id first 1 72 1 72 width 451 height 698 gt lt pageTemplate gt lt template gt lt stylesheet gt lt stylesheet gt lt story gt lt para gt lt para gt lt story gt lt document gt This example has used the template stylesheet story form of document But the story is empty and we haven t used the stylesheet at all The following exampl
67. d face and italics and font changes For example the following mark up lt gt this is lt gt lt gt lt b gt example lt b gt font color red gt including red text font xpre generates the following text this is an xpre example including red text Page 33 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 7 8 Greek letters The greek tag is used for producing Greek letters in RML This is of most use for equations and formulae Example In physics Planck s formula for black body radiation can be expressed as RA c 4 8 2 hc A Men KT In RML this is expressed as R lt greek gt 1 lt greek gt c 4 8 lt greek gt p lt greek gt lt greek gt 1 lt greek gt lt super gt 4 lt super gt hc greek l greek 1 e lt super gt hc lt greek gt 1 lt greek gt kT lt super gt 1 For a table of the Greek letters used by the lt greek gt tag and their representations in RML look in Appendix C at the end of this manual This next example show features from several of the commands describes in the previous sections such as the use of frames the options to the template tag stylesheets and so on See the next section for information on using the lt name gt and lt getName gt tags EXAMPLE 5 lt xml version 1 0 encoding iso 8859 1 standalone no gt lt DOCTYPE document SYSTEM rml 1 O dtd document filename example 5 pdf template pageSize 21
68. d gt lt para style paddingTableStyle gt just blockBottomPadding lt para gt lt td gt lt td gt lt para style paddingTableStyle gt lt b gt blockRightPadding lt b gt with lt b gt blockBottomPadding lt b gt lt para gt lt td gt lt tr gt tr lt td gt lt illustration width 141 height 90 gt lt image file images replogo gif x 0 y 0 width 141 height 90 gt stroke color deepskyblue gt lt lineMode width 3 gt lt lines gt 00 141 0 141 0 141 90 141 90 0 90 09000 lt lines gt lt illustration gt Page 86 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 lt td gt lt td gt lt illustration width 141 height 90 gt lt image file images replogo gif x 0 y 0 width 141 height 90 gt lt stroke color deepskyblue gt lt lineMode width 3 gt lt lines gt 0 0 141 0 141 0 141 90 141 90 0 90 09000 lines illustration lt td gt lt td gt lt illustration width 141 height 90 gt lt image file images replogo gif x 0 y 0 width 141 height 90 gt lt stroke color deepskyblue gt lt lineMode width 3 gt lt lines gt 0 0 141 0 141 0 141 90 141 90 0 90 09000 lt lines gt lt illustration gt lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt lt para style paddingTableStyle gt lt b gt blockLeftPadding lt b gt with lt b gt blockTopPadding lt para gt lt td gt lt td gt lt td gt lt para style paddingTa
69. e is defined as the portion of the character that falls below the baseline Bezier curves Named after the French mathematician Pierre B zier Bezier curves utilize at least three points to define a curve The endpoints are called the anchor points while any other point is known as a node The curves produced by RML s curves tag are Bezier curves bitmap A bitmap is a way of storing an image In bitmaps each pixel picture cell is stored as one or more bits of data in a map consisting of rows and columns This means that when you print them out at the size they were created at they look fine but shrinking or enlarging them leads to them looking blocky and ragged JPEG and GIF are both bitmapped graphics formats as are BMP PICT and PNG You can use gifs and jpegs in your RML document with the image tag see also gif JPEG image Boolean Named after the nineteenth century mathematician George Boole Boolean logic is a form of algebra in which all values are reduced to either TRUE or FALSE or 0 and 1 CMYK way of specifying a color by its Cyan Magenta Yellow and Black Key components Usually used when referring to pigments such as in printing DTD Document Type Definition A term from XML that refers to the file that defines the legal building blocks of an XML document and the permissible ways to structure it empty elements Empty elements are those tags that don t have any content and are closed
70. e of both place and illustration EXAMPLE 9 Page 68 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 lt xml version 1 0 encoding iso 8859 1 standalone no gt DOCTYPE document SYSTEM rml 1 O dtd document filename example 9 pdf template lt pageTemplate id main lt pageGraphics gt grid 1 2cm 3cm 4cm 5cm 10cm 20cm ys 1em 2cm 3cm 4cm 5cm 10cm 20cm gt place x 10 5cm y 10 5cm width 9cm height 9cm gt lt title gt This is a use of lt i gt place lt i gt lt title gt spacer length 15 gt para This is a flowable In this case it is in a amp lt para amp gt tag but it could be any flowable It has been placed inside a grid but you could put it inside any graphic or pageGraphics Using the place tag you can have complete control over where you want your flowables to appear para spacer length 12 gt para You can include Greek lt greek gt abgd lt greek gt para spacer length 12 gt lt blockTable gt Er lt td gt Or lt td gt lt td gt even lt td gt lt tr gt tr lt td gt a lt td gt lt td gt blockTable lt td gt lt tr gt lt blockTable gt lt place gt lt pageGraphics gt frame id first x1 72 1 72 width 451 height 698 gt lt pageTemplate gt lt template gt lt stylesheet gt lt paraStyle name style Title fontName Courier Bold fontSize 24 leading 36 gt lt stylesheet
71. e of the file and display it at any size that is appropriate The x y width and height attributes can all be gives in points mm cm or inches Be very careful when using the width andheight attributes If misused these attributes can lead to you having a distorted ugly and out of proportion picture in your final document Whenever possible you should use a paint application e g Paintshop Pro Photoshop Graphics Converter GIMP to save the file at the correct size and use the correct height and width attributes to the image tag Using larger files and re sizing inside RML will also lead to the output PDF file being bloated and larger than it needs to be This example shows how these tags look in action lt pageGraphics gt image file myFile gif x 72 y 72 gt image file myFile gif x 369 y 72 width 80 height 80 gt image file myFile2 jpg x 72 493 gt image file myFile2 jpg x 369 y 493 width 80 height 80 pageGraphics 10 11 place and illustration place We have seen how graphics and flowables do not mix in RML The only exceptions to this are the place tag and the illustration tag place allows you to put a flowable inside a pageGraphic or illustration You can include a paragraph inside a grid or a table inside a pat h place takes 4 attributes all of which are required x and y are the x and y co ordinates for where you want the flowable placed width
72. e shows how we can use the pageDrawing form EXAMPLE 7b lt xml version 1 0 encoding iso 8859 1 standalone no gt lt DOCTYPE document SYSTEM rml 1 O dtd document filename example 7b pdf lt stylesheet gt lt stylesheet gt lt pageDrawing gt fill color red gt lt stroke color black gt path x 247 yz 72 fill yes stroke yes close yes gt 247 172 147 172 147 272 247 272 247 372 347 372 347 372 347 272 447 272 447 172 347 172 347 72 lt moveto gt 267 572 lt moveto gt 277 612 lt curvesto gt 147 585 147 687 297 792 447 687 447 585 317 612 lt curvesto gt 327 572 lt path gt lt pageDrawing gt lt document gt Page 62 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 10 3 grids The grid isa graphics tag and hence lives in the PageGraphics section of your RML document It produces a grid of lines It takes two arguments xs which is a list of x co ordinates separated by commas and ys which is a comma separated list of y co ordinates Example grid xs 1cm 2cm 3cm 4cm 5cm 10cm ys 1cm 2cm 3cm 4cm 5cm 10cm 10 4 Translations In a graphic operation i e a pageGraphic oran illustration translate moves the origin of the drawing translate takes two optional attributes dx and dy Both can be given in any unit that RML understands dx is the distance that the to be moved in the X axis and dy is the distance it is to be moved in the Y a
73. e the RML parser but it may well confuse you 3 2 Using Colors There are three ways to specify colors in RML e byred green blue value e by cyan magenta yellow black value e color name The RGB or additive color specification follows the way a computer screen adds different levels of the red green or blue light to make any color White is formed by turning all three lights on full 1 1 1 The CMYK or subtractive method follows the way a printer mixes three pigments cyan magenta and yellow to form colors Because mixing chemicals is more difficult than combining light there is a fourth parameter for darkness A chemical combination of the CMY pigments almost never makes aperfect black instead producing a muddy brown s0 to get black printers use a direct black ink rather than use the CMY pigments The name CMYK comes from the name of the four colors used Cyan Magenta Yellow and Key a term sometimes used by printers to refer to black Because CMYK maps more directly to the way printer hardware works it may be the case that colors specified in CMYK will provide better fidelity and better control when printed The color names which RML recognizes are mostly drawn from the HTML specification For a list of these color names recognized by RML see Appendix A NOTE Currently while RML supports specifying colors by CMYK value rml2pdf hasn t yet implemented it If you try you well get a ValueError and the error mess
74. e used for single line mono space text with visible subcompartments for each letter Checkboxes By default checkboxes have a very simple style similar to UK bank application forms an outer rectangle and a cross which exactly fills it when checked The attributes control the appearance It is also possible to supply your own pair of bitmap images which will be used instead of the default drawing mechanism this could be used to provide 3d effects tick and cross icons or whatever is needed To make use of this set the two attributes graphicOn and graphicOff to point to two bitmap files on the disk these will be used in preference to the default appearance Note that they will be stretched to the box Width and boxHeight stated so it is important to set the same aspect ratio as the underlying image Also remember the printing intent a 24 pixel bitmap drawn to occupy a 12 point space on a form will be visibly grainy on a good quality printer but may be fine on an inkjet Page 48 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 Because checkboxes do not contain text it can be argued that when they are to be displayed as checked the cross colour should be the same as the border colour Equally well it can be argued that it should be the same colour used for text in textboxes To provide both options checkboxes have an additional colour attribute named checkStrokeColor which will be used for the cross instead of the border colour if the former is prov
75. e you may need to give a filename they are relative to where the document lives on your disk not to where rml2pdf is 2 3 Document forms stylesheet pageDrawing vs template stylesheet story There are two possible valid structures for your document to have depending on how simple you want it to be For very simple documents you need the prolog followed by a stylesheet and any number of pageDrawings pageDrawing isa graphical element on the page or simple text string i e it is just placed onto the page in the location you specify and no attempt is made to check if it flows off the page EXAMPLE 1 lt DOCTYPE document SYSTEM rml 1 O dtd document filename example 1 pdf lt stylesheet gt lt stylesheet gt lt pageDrawing gt lt drawCentredString x 4 1in y 5 8in gt Hello World lt drawCentredString gt lt pageDrawing gt lt document gt All the examples given in this tutorial can be found as rml files in the same directory as this tutorial Page 10 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 Hello World Figure 25 Output from EXAMPLE 1 This is the most basic RML document you can get It is the traditional Hello World AII it does is place the string of text Hello World into the middle of your A4 page Not very useful in the real world but enough to show you how simple RML can be Notice how it does have a stylesheet but it is empty Stylesheets are mandatory but they don t n
76. eStyle gt blockRightPadding with blockBottomPadding lt para gt lt td gt lt tr gt lt blockTable gt lt story gt lt document gt Page 88 of 123 RML User Guide Example 12 images and padding in tables blockLeftPadding with blockBottomPadding blockLeftPadding with blockTopPadding blockLeftPadding with blockTopPadding just blockBottomPadding just blockTopPadding no padding Figure 48 Output from EXAMPLE 12 Page 89 of 123 Revision 1 16 blockRightPadding with blockBottomPadding blockRightPadding with blockTopPadding blockRightPadding with blockBottomPadding RML User Guide Appendix A Colors recognized by RML Revision 1 16 In this table the Color column gives the name of the color as recognised in the HTML standard and RML The hexadecimal number in the Hex Value column corresponds to the red green and blue RGB components in the color the first two digits represent red the next two green and the last two the blue The just shows it s a hexadecimal number DEM AU 60 00 0 91019 6 4 60 6 6 6 66 S 4 1019 OO Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 aliceblue antiquewhite aqua aquamarine azu
77. eed to actually contain anything Also notice how in the drawCenteredString tag the co ordinates are enclosed in quotation marks they are attributes and so need to live inside quotes And if you look at the drawCenteredString tag these attributes are inside the tag actually inside the angle brackets then the content of the string comes after it then the tag is closed by its matching drawCenteredString tag All tags with content need their matching closing tag the document and stylesheet tags are also parts of matching pairs One last thing to notice is the DOCTYPE line for all these examples we are assuming that the DTD is in the same directory as the example file itself This may not always be the case For a more complex RML document you can use the more powerful template stylesheet story form of document In this a file contains the following three sections e atemplate e astylesheet e aStory The template tells rmI2pdf what should be on the page headers footers any graphic elements you use as background The stylesheet is where the styles for a document are set This tells the parser what fonts to use for paragraphs and paragraph headers how to format tables and other things of that nature Page 11 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 The story is where the meat of the document is Just like in a newspaper the story is the bit you want people to read as opposed to design elements or page markup
78. es but show some significant differences too Usually the overall width of a form field element is defined by the mandatory boxwidth attribute For letterboxes though this is an optional attribute and specifies the width of a subcell containing one letter The resulting width of the entire box is defined as a multiple of that boxwidth attribute with another one named count which is a mandatory attribute The following code creates a row of sample letterboxes showing basic attributes lt letterBoxes x 0cm y 7 5cm count 12 gt letterboxes lt letterBoxes gt lt letterBoxes count 12 gt more letterboxes lt letterBoxes gt lt letterBoxes x 0cm y 4 5cm boxWidth 0 75cm count 12 gt letterboxes lt letterBoxes gt lt letterBoxes x 0cm y 3cm lineWidth z 0 1cm boxFillColor yellow boxStrokeColor blue label some label count 12 gt letterboxes lt letterBoxes gt lt letterBoxes x 0cm y 1 5cm lineWidth 0 1cm boxFillColor yellow boxStrokeColor blue label some label fontName Courier Bold fontSize 14 count 12 gt letterboxes lt letterBoxes gt lt letterBoxes x 0cm y 0cm lineWidth 0 1cm boxWidth 0 75cm boxHeight 0 75cm boxFillColor yellow boxStrokeColor blue label some label fontName Times Bold fontSize 14 count 12 gt letterboxes lt letterBoxes gt Page 51 of 123 RML User Guide Ec ie t ele eye
79. for plug in plugInGraphic path path y Jin Glose rtrue fill true stroke false gt lin 6in lin 7in lt path gt Path Operations moveto lt moveto gt bin 3ih lt moveto gt curvesto lt curvesto gt lin lin lin 4in 4in 4in dan 2in 2an bin bin bin curvesto Form Field Elements Page 112 of 123 string string measurement measurement truth value truth value truth value Revision 1 16 required required unformatted data required required measurement pairs representing points or path operations measurement pair sextuples of measurements for bezier curves RML User Guide barCode lt barCode x lan y lin code Code 11 gt 01234545634563 lt barCode gt checkBox lt checkBox style myboxstyle x Lin labelFontName Helvetica labelFontSize 12 labelTextColor blue boxWidth lin boxHeight lin checkstrokeColor blue boxStrokecolor blue boxFillColor blue lineWidth 1 linel label text 1 line2 label text 2 line3 label text 3 checked false bold false graphicOn cute_on jpg graphicOff oute off jpg gt 113 123 Revision 1 16 measurement required measurement required Codabar Codet 1 required Code128 2015 Standard39 Standard93 Extended39 Extended93 MSI FIM POSTNET unformatted barcode data string box style name
80. fore you do the rotate If yu translate to the middle of the page rotate by 90 degrees and then draw the string hello the hello will appear starting in the middle of the page going upwards Examples rotate degrees 90 gt lt ANTI clockwise gt rotate degrees 90 gt lt clockwise gt This is what a rotate looks like with degrees set to 45 and 45 e le Original degrees 45 Figure 39 A rotate with a positive value for degrees pls Original degrees 45 Figure 40 A rotate with a negative value for degrees Page 65 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 10 7 Skew lt skew gt isa transform which distorts both axes of a graphic It is non orthagonal in other words it is a transformation that does not preserve right angles lt skew gt has two mandatory attributes alpha and beta Both are angles look at the example below to see how they work Example lt skew alpha 10 beta 10 gt This is what a skew withan alpha of 10 andabeta of 30 looks like beta alpha Original alpha 10 beta 30 Figure 41 An example of the lt skew gt tag in use 10 8 Generic affine transforms A transform allows the coordinate space to be filtered through a general two dimensional affine transform All the other coordinate transformations can be defined in terms of a transform A transform requires 6 numbers a b c d e and f to define the transformation x ax cyte y bxt dyt f
81. gt is where C is defined lt namedString gt By default RML2PDF will fail in this case also but it is possible to invoke the main processing function RML2PDF go to allow additional formatting passes For example as in Page 56 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 rml2pdf go xmlInputText passLimit 3 to request that the processor execute a maximum of 3 formatting passes before signalling an error if more unresolved names remain WARNING A document that requires two formatting passes will take about twice as long to generate as a document that requires only one For time critical applications it is best to avoid the need for extra formatting passes if they are not needed RML documents that do not have references to names before they are defined will not require more than one formatting pass 9 3 Calculated Page Numbers evalString Some documents require the ability to give relative pagenumbers To meet this requirement RML2PDF includes the evalString tag For example The following para lt para gt lt font color crimson The last page is lt getName id LASTPAGENO default 999 One less than that is evalString default XXXX gt getName id LASTPAGENO default 999 1 lt evalString gt The current page is lt pageNumber gt And there are lt evalString default XXXX gt lt getName id LASTPAGENO default 999 lt pageNumber gt evalString pages to go font para
82. gt 24 lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt background lt td gt lt td background pink gt pink lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt background lt td gt lt td background lightblue gt lightblue lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt align lt td gt lt td align left gt left lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt align lt td gt lt td align center gt center lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt align lt td gt lt td align right gt right lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt vAlign td td vAlign top gt top lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt vAlign td td vAlign middle gt middle lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt vAlign td td vAlign bottom gt bottom lt td gt lt tr gt lt blockTable gt produces leading leading is 16 leading leading is 12 Page 80 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 leftPadding rightPadding rightPadding topPadding u w bottomPadding bottomPadding 24 top vAlign vAlign bottom Figure 46 Output table from EXAMPLE 10 Page 81 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 11 3 Example 11 lines and alignment in tables This example shows the various vertical and horizontal alignments you can give text in a table as well as a few ways to use lines EXAMPLE 11 lt xml version 1 0 encoding iso 8859 1 standalone no gt lt DOCTYPE document SYSTEM rml 1 O dtd
83. hose RML documents that use the template stylesheet story form this is the part of the document where any headers footers or background graphic elements are defined vanilla Plain ordinary or standard from the default flavor of ice cream in the U S In RML you can put in letters numbers and punctuation in places which allow you to use vanilla text but tags such as para or lt b gt are not allowed whitespace For programmers whitespace refers to all the characters that appear as blanks on your screen This includes the space and tab characters linefeeds carriage returns and other more specialised characters For designers whitespace is any areas on a page that aren t the content the bits that are free of text or artwork XML The Extensible Markup Language a document processing standard set by the World Wide Web Consortium W3C the people who defined the standard for HTML Page 97 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 Appendix C Letters used by the Greek tag Greek Letter a lt RML Representation lt greek gt a lt greek gt lt greek gt b lt greek gt lt greek gt c lt greek gt lt greek gt d lt greek gt lt greek gt e lt greek gt lt greek gt f lt greek gt lt greek gt g lt greek gt lt greek gt h lt greek gt lt greek gt i lt greek gt lt greek gt j lt greek gt lt greek gt k lt greek gt lt greek gt l lt greek gt lt greek gt m lt greek gt lt gree
84. ided Note that the label attached to a checkbox is limited to three lines of text now and always appears at the right margin of the box but this might be generalised in future versions The label is expected to be vertically centered with the box no matter how many lines it is composed of The following code creates a row of sample checkboxes providing different values for the most relevant attributes lt checkBox y 0cm checked 0 gt lt checkBox x 1 5cm checked 1 gt lt checkBox x 3cm y 0cm boxWidth 0 75cm boxHeight 1cm checkedz 1 lt checkBox x 4 5cm y 0cm boxWidth 0 75cm boxHeight 1cm lineWidth 0 1cm checkedz 1 lt checkBox x 6cm y 0cm lineWidth 0 1cm boxFillColor yellow boxStrokeColor green checked 1 gt lt checkBox x 7 5cm y 0cm lineWidth 0 1cm boxFillColor yellow boxStrokeColor green checkStrokeColor red checked 1 gt lt checkBox x 9cm y 0 linel desc 1 line2 desc 2 checked 1 gt lt checkBox x 11 5cm y 0 linel desc 1 line2 desc 2 line3 desc 3 checked 1 gt desc 1 dose 1 L desc 2 X desc 2 desc 3 Textboxes A textbox contains one but often more lines of text like in an address field Of course it can also contain no text at all like for a signature field Sometimes it is not clear in advance exactly how much text will go into one such field Therefore textbox fields in RML provide a mean
85. ines that follow on from each other look at the Advanced figures section later in this manual Page 19 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 For example this draws a simple line lines 2 5in 10 5in 3 5in 10 5in lines And this starts with the same line then draws an extra couple of lines below it lines 2 5in 10 5in 3 5in 10 5in 2 5in 10 25in 3 5in 10 25in 2 5in 10in 3 5in 10in lines It doesn t matter how you arrange the sets of co ordinates but it helps to keep it human readable if you keep co ordinates to do with the same line on the same line of RML This second example could have been written like this but it would be much harder to follow lt lines gt 2 5in 10 5in 3 5in 10 5in 2 5in 10 25 3 5in 10 25in 2 5in 10in 3 5in 10in lines One more thing to notice before we move on is that these co ordinates are separated by spaces They are not separated by commas as you might expect As well as just drawing lines there are a number of attributes you can modify to change the appearance of lines This is done with the lt lineMode gt tag The most obvious attribute to lt lineMode gt is width You can give lt lineMode gt a number for the width attribute to change the line width to that number of points ws width 1 width z 5 width z 10 width z 15 Figure 28 Example of lineMode attribute width The join attribute to 1ineMode adjusts how what happens when lines meet They
86. inggreen mediumturquoise mediumvioletred midnightblue mintcream mistyrose moccasin navajowhite navy oldlace olive Page 92 of 123 Revision 1 16 Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex OxFFDEAD 0x000080 OxFDF5E6 0x808000 xF08080 xEOFFFF XFAFAD2 0 90 90 xD3D3D3 6 x20B2AA Ox87CEFA 0x778899 xBOCADE xFFFFEO xOOFFOO0 x32CD32 OxFAFOE6 OxFFOOFF x800000 X66CDAA x0000CD XBA55D3 x9370DB 0x3CB371 x 7BO8EE x00FA9A x48D1CC 0xC71585 0x191970 OxF5FFFA xFFEAEI 5 RML User Guide M d smi s ENS Ld ae pe L O OOOO OOO JJJ JOVO OV OVVU V OR Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 125 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 olivedrab orange orangered orchid palegoldenrod palegreen paleturquoise palevioletred papayawhip peachpuff peru pink plum powderblue purp
87. inkToFit false Lapel lebel text gt box contents goes here lt textBox gt Revision 1 16 string box style name measurement required measurement required measurement required measurement required string font name fontsize measurement string color name measurement measurement string color name string color name string color name measurement string font name fontsize measurement left right or center Graphical State Change Operations fill lt fill color blue gt stroke lt stroke color blue gt Page 115 of 123 truth value string unformatted data string name required string name required RML User Guide setFont lt setFont name Helvetica size l1cm gt form lt form name logo gt drawString gt lt drawString gt lt place gt lt place gt lt form gt catchForms lt catchForms storageFile storage data gt scale lt scale sx 0 8 ay 1 3 gt translate lt translate dx 0 8in aya 1 3in gt rotate lt rotate degrees 45 gt Page 116 of 123 string name measurement string name string name scale factor scale factor measurement measurement angle in degrees Revision 1 16 required required required Sequence of graphical operations required required required required required required RML User Guide skew lt skew alpha 15 beta 5 gt transform
88. ints If you use a number that is smaller than the size of font you are using the lines will overlap leftIndent rightIndent leftIndent and rightIndent apply space to the left or right of a paragraph which is in addition to any margin you have set firstLineIndent firstLineIndent is used when you want your paragraph to have an additional indent on the first line on top of anything set with left Indent spaceBefore spaceAfter spaceBefore and spaceAfter as you would expect set the spacing before a paragraph or after it textColor This sets the color to be used in displaying a paragraph bulletText bulletColor bulletFontName bulletFontSize bulletIndent These are all used to set the characteristics for any bullets to be used in the paragraph Inside the story you can also do a number of things that you can t do with the drawString commands Fora start you can use bold and italics If you are familiar with HTML you will recognize these tags i and lt i gt start and stop italics and lt b gt and lt b gt start and stop the text being set as bold 7 4 The font tag You can also explicitly set the font using the font tag This has the optional attributes of face color and size which are all pretty self explanatory You need to lt font gt tag to close this before the end of the paragraph Example font face Courier color crimson gt This is courier in crimson font That example produces
89. ires correct XML syntax If you are familiar with HTML you should pay special attention to the differences between XML syntax and some of the more forgiving constructs allowed in HTML e Attribute values must be enclosed in quotation marks e g you would have to use document filename outfile pdf since you couldn t get away with document filename outfile pdf e non empty element must have both an opening and a closing tag e g a document tag must be matched by a matching lt document gt tag Empty elements are those that don t have any content and are closed with a at the end of the same tag rather than having a separate closing tag e g lt getName id Header Title e Tags must be nested correctly i e lt b gt lt i gt text lt b gt lt i gt isn t valid but lt b gt lt i gt text lt i gt lt b gt is e On the whole whitespace is ignored in RML Except inside strings you can format and indent your RML documents in whatever way you consider most readable Inside text strings whitespace is seen as equivalent to a single space and line breaks are added automatically as needed during formatting Other than that what you type is what is displayed on the page e RML is case sensitive Upper Case is different from upper case UPPER CASE and UpPeR CaSe The capitalization in the tag names is important 2 2 The prolog Every RML document must start with a number of lines lt x
90. is is the contents for lt i gt column two lt i gt para para style body gt It uses the paragraph style we have called body para para style body gt Does it come out OK para para style body gt There now follows some random text to see how these paragraphs look with longer content para para style body Blah OS 2 blah blah blah blah coffee blah blah blah blah Windows blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Modula 3 blah blah blah Blah blah bug report blah blah blah blah blah memory blah blah TeX TCP IP SMTP blah blah para para style body gt Blah blah blah blah blah Em blah letterform blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah letterform blah blah Blah blah blah blah leader blah blah blah blah para para style body gt Blah blah blah blah blah uppercase blah blah right justified blah blah blah flush right blah blah blah Blah blah blah blah blah blah spot colour blah Em para para style body gt Blah dingbat blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Blah blah blah blah blah drop cap blah blah blah blah blah blah blah para story document Page 36 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 Exampin 5 templates and page Templates Vix ia dica d bu Tih Pus wa gms ng FHAR W SE quiis cita bbw ees
91. k gt n lt greek gt greek o greek greek p greek lt greek gt q lt greek gt lt greek gt r lt greek gt lt greek gt s lt greek gt lt greek gt t lt greek gt lt greek gt u lt greek gt lt greek gt v lt greek gt lt greek gt w lt greek gt lt greek gt x lt greek gt lt greek gt y lt greek gt lt greek gt z lt greek gt Greek Letter Page 98 of 123 A B gt lt Z RML Representation greek A greek greek B greek greek C greek greek D greek lt greek gt E lt greek gt lt greek gt F lt greek gt lt greek gt G lt greek gt lt greek gt H lt greek gt lt greek gt I lt greek gt lt greek gt J lt greek gt lt greek gt K lt greek gt lt greek gt L lt greek gt lt greek gt M lt greek gt lt greek gt N lt greek gt lt greek gt O lt greek gt lt greek gt P lt greek gt lt greek gt Q lt greek gt lt greek gt R lt greek gt lt greek gt S lt greek gt lt greek gt T lt greek gt lt greek gt U lt greek gt lt greek gt V lt greek gt lt greek gt W lt greek gt lt greek gt X lt greek gt lt greek gt Y lt greek gt lt greek gt Z lt greek gt RML User Guide Appendix D Command reference attributes are optional unless otherwise specified document document filename myfile pdf string gt lt template gt lt template gt lt stylesheet gt lt stylesheet gt
92. l take the PDF file called mypdffile pdf use pageCatcher behind the scenes and include every page in the PDF file in your output There is also an optional pages attribute This can have either individual pages or ranges The following are all valid providing the PDF file is long enough lt includePdfPages filename mypdffile pdf lt includePdfPages filename mypdffile pdf pages 1 gt lt includePdfPages filename mypdffile pdf pages 1 2 3 gt lt includePdfPages filename mypdffile pdf pages 2 1 1 2 2 gt lt includePdfPages filename mypdffile pdf 1 5 gt lt includePdfPages filename mypdffile pdf 1 2 4 5 gt There are a number of differences between this tag and the other PageCatcher related tags Unlike the others includePdfPages doesn t require you to pre pagecatch the file you intend to use so saving you an additional step It also differs in that the imported PDF gets drawn over the top of your exiting document rather than being used as a background underneath your existing page So if you have a header or footer in your page template the included PDF page will overwrite it How includePdfPages works with templates When you have an includePdfPages tag in your RML file RML outputs a page break before the first new page leaving you on the same page as the last imported one This allows you to do template switching lt setNextTemplate gt lt setNextTemplate name myIncludePage
93. le red rosybrown royalblue saddlebrown salmon sandybrown seagreen seashell sienna silver skyblue slateblue slategray Snow springgreen steelblue tan teal thistle Page 93 of 123 Revision 1 16 Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex x6B8E23 500 xFF4500 xDA70D6 xEEES8AA x98FB98 XAFEEEE xDE 7093 xFFEFD5 xFFDABO9 xCD853F xDDAODD 6 x800080 xFF0000 xBC8F8F 4169 1 x8B4513 xFA8072 xF4A460 x2E8B57 xFFF5EE xA0522D xC0C0C0 x87CEEB X6A5DACD x708090 xOOFF7F x4682B4 xD2B48C x008080 xD8BFD8 RML User Guide Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 OOO Text 123 Text 123 OO tomato turquoise violet wheat white whitesmoke yellow yellowgreen Page 94 of 123 Revision 1 16 Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex 6347 x40EODO OxEES82EE OxF5DEB3 xFFFFFF xF5F5F5 xFFFFOO x9ACD32 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 Appendix B Glossary of terms and abbreviations baseline In typography the imaginary line on which characters sit The x height of a font is measured from the baseline to the top of a lowercase x The descender for those characters that have on
94. m height l1cm origin page gt lt para gt This is right at the bottom of the page lt para gt lt storyPlace gt lt storyPlace x 0 y 0 width 18cm height 1cm origin frame gt lt para gt This is right at the bottom of the current frame lt para gt lt storyPlace gt lt storyPlace x 0 y 0 width 18cm height 1cm origin local gt Page 28 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 lt para gt This is right at the current frame position lt para gt storyPlace 6 5 pto Please Turn Over Control The pto tag is a flowable container that holds an arbitrary number of other flowables The first two may be special pto trailer lt header tags each of which may contain arbitrary flowables The idea is that the trailer flowables are issued at the bottom of the page whenever the main container flowables split the header flowables appear at the top of the next frame pto pto trailer para textColor blue style pto gt See u on next frame para pto trailer pto header para textColor blue style pto gt back from the previous frame para pto header para style hl A header lt para gt para style bt gt Many vast star fields in the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy are rich in clouds of dust and gas First and foremost visible in the above picture are millions of stars many of which are similar to our Sun Next huge filaments of dark interstellar dust run ac
95. m creation elements checkBoxes letterBoxes and textBoxes with the boxStyle tag Refer to the sections on blockTables and Form Field Tags later in this document for details on how to use these Page 30 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 7 Advanced text 7 1 Title The title tag sets the title for a document or a section of a document and displays it on the page By default this is set in a larger typeface than the body text in a similar way that headers are You can change the way a title is set by setting a style called style Title inthestylesheet section of your document Note This tag does not affect what is displayed in the title bar at the top of a document Example lt stylesheet gt lt paraStyle name style Title fontName Courier Bold fontSize 36 leading 44 gt stylesheet story lt title gt This is the Title lt title gt para And it should be set in 36 pt Courier Bold para story 7 2 Headings h1 h2 h3 Headings are also handled in the same way as in HTML The most important heading level has its text enclosed by lt 1 gt and lt 1 gt tags and less important sub headings use the lt h2 gt lt h2 gt and lt h3 gt lt h3 gt tags in the same way 7 3 Paragraphs and paragraph styles As well as explicitly placing a piece of text into a certain position on a page using the drawSt ring commands RML also allows you to use paragraphs of text Paragr
96. me PF1 gt lt pageGraphics gt lt illustration gt If you do use repeated lt catchForms gt tags to point at the same data file you will get an error message similar to the one below ValueError redefining named object FormXob PFO0 If this is the case find the places where you are using the second and subsequent cat chForms tags and delete them leaving only the lt doForm gt tags Of course this doesn t apply to any doForms which are pointing at other data files They would still need their own initial lt catchForms gt tags Note For the lt catchForms gt tag to work you must have PageCatcher installed In addition your PageCatcher must be the full version with a py or pyc file The exe version of PageCatcher will not work with RML2PDF If you get the error message ImportError catchForms tag requires the PageCatcher product http www reportlab com then you either do not have PageCatcher installed or have the wrong version The includePdfPages tag In some circumstances you may not know how many pages there will be in the PDF file you need to pageCatch This is the case which lt includePdfPages gt tag was designed for Page 46 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 lt includePdfPages gt isa generic flowable which means that it can appear at any point in the story In its simplest form an includePdfPages tag will look like this includePdfPages filename mypdffile pdf This wil
97. ment can be seen as works in progress This document will be improved over time 1 5 Who is this document aimed at This document is aimed at anyone who needs to write RML It assumes that you have some experience with some form of programming or scripting Basic HTML is fine You do not have to be employed as a programmer or have extensive programming skills for this guide to make sense We have tried to keep it as simple as possible and to minimise confusion 1 6 Conventions used in this document It is more technically correct to call the various items in RML elements as you do in XML However since we re assuming that more people know basic HTML than XML we ll call them tags rather than entities in this guide There are also a couple of typographical conventions we ll be using constant width Throughout this User Guide we ll be using a constant width typeface to highlight any literal element of RML such as tag names or attributes for tags when they appear in the text 8 point Courier A smaller constant width font is used for code snippets short one or two line examples of what RML commands look like and code examples longer examples of RML which usually have an illustration of the output they produce Page 7 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 Part I The Basics Page 8 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 2 Pages and page structures 2 1 XML syntax and RML As with every XML dialect RML requ
98. ml version 1 0 encoding iso 8859 1 standalone no gt lt DOCTYPE document SYSTEM rml 1 O dtd This is called the prolog you can think of it as the document header lt xml standalone no gt This line is the XML declaration This is optional but recommended version 1 0 This attribute tells the parser which version of XML it should use in this case 1 0 standalone no This tells the parser that it needs an external Document Type Definition more on DTDs below encoding iso 8859 1 The encoding attribute sets the encoding you want the PDF file to use ISO 8859 1 is the character set otherwise known as US ASCII this encodes the set of characters known as Latin 1 or Latin Alphabet No 1 and covers the characters from most Western European Languages as well as some control characters and graphical characters RML 1 0 only allows you to use Latin 1 encoding though this may change in future RML currently also doesn t support Unicode though we do intend to support it in the future lt DOCTYPE rml 1 O dtd This line tells the parser where the Document Type Definition is located The DTD formally specifies the syntax of RML For documents written in RML the DTD should always be the current version of rml dtd The rml DTD should always be called rml X X dtd where the Xs are replaced by the version number So since the current version of RML is 1 0 the DTD is called rml 1 O dtd Page
99. ng RGB 77aa00 Page 122 of 123 string measurement measurement measurement measurement string string string string string string Revision 1 16 required required required required required required required required required required required hexidecimal red green blue values RML User Guide pageNumber lt pageNumber gt outlineAdd KoutlineAdd level 1 closed true gt Chapter 1 section 2 lt outlineAdd gt Not implemented Revision 1 16 integer truth value outline entry text The following tags are allowed for in the DTD but are not implemented by the current version of RML2PDF li ol u ul Page 123 of 123
100. nloaded in the free Asian Font Packs from Adobe s site In these cases there is no need to embed any fonts or to have any special software on the server The first stage is to declare the fonts you need in the optional docinit tag at the beginning of the document as follows document filename test 015 japanese pdf lt docinit gt registerCidFont faceName HeiseiMin W3 encName z 90msp RKSJ H docinit template etc You may then declare paragraph styles use string drawing operations or blockTable fonts referring to the font you have defined The font name to use is a combination of the face name and encoding name separated by a hyphen lt paraStyle name jtext fontName HeiseiMin W3 90msp RKSJ H fontSize 12 leading 14 spaceBefore 12 Page 37 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 The test directory includes a file test 015 japanese rml containing a working simplified example in Japanese Warning You will need to have a number of CMap files available on your system These are files provided by Adobe which contain information on the encodings of all the glyphs in the font RML2PDF looks for these in locations defined in the CMapSearchPath variable in the file reportlab rl config py which knows where to find Acrobat Reader on most Windows and Unix systems If you wish to use Asian fonts on another system you can copy these files which may be redistributed freely from a machine with Acrobat Re
101. nt of a larger Python language installation Since Python integrates with a wide variety of other languages it is also possible to access RML2PDF from C and programs COM and many other environments These versions also include library modules which have been compiled for each platform This style of installation provides the greatest flexibility but it also requires more effort to administer and maintain You need this style of installation if you wish to build additional plug in components for RML2PDF or if you wish to use RML2PDF seamlessly as a built in component of other Python programs or applications We or our resellers can advise on the best installation for a particular need and assist with building installations for specific platforms In all cases RML2PDF requires a license key file to work in production mode Without the license key each page produced by RML2PDF will be visibly marked as an evaluation copy and the file will be annotated invisibly as produced for evaluation purposes as well With a valid license key file present RML2PDF will run in production mode and the PDF file generated will contain the licensing information The license key file must be named RML2PDFLicense py and placed in the same directory with the rml2pdf program Running RML2PDF RML2PDF is normally run from the command line like so prompt rml2pdf filename rml This assumes that either you are using the exe version of the program or that your system i
102. ntraparagraph markup h2 h3 lt h3 style myfavoritstyle gt Paragraph text which may contain intraparagraph markup lt h3 gt Intra Paragraph Markup lt i gt Paragraph text which may contain intraparagraph markup lt i gt b lt b gt Paragraph text which may contain intraparagraph markup lt b gt Page 104 of 123 Revision 1 16 string paragraph style name string paragraph style name string paragraph style name RML User Guide font font face Helvetica color blue Size 34 gt Paragraph text which may contain intraparagraph markup font greek greek Paragraph text which may contain intraparagraph markup greek sub sub Paragraph text which may contain intraparagraph markup sub super super Paragraph text which may contain intraparagraph markup super seq seq id SecNum template Ch s SecNum s gt Page 105 of 123 string font name string color name fontsize measurement string string Revision 1 16 RML User Guide seqDefault seqDefault id SecNum gt seqReset lt seqReset id SecNum gt seqChain seqChain order id id id id gt seqFormat lt seqFormat id seqIid value format char gt Page Level Flowables nextFrame lt nextFrame gt nextPage lt nextPage gt setNextTemplate lt setNextTemplate name indextemplate
103. number smaller than the size of font you are using you can arrange it so that the lines overlap each other orthogonal An adjective from mathematics meaning relating to or composed of right angles A non orthogonal transformation is one which does not preserve right angles skew is a non orthogonal transformation PDF The Portable Document Format format created by Adobe this is a standard for electronic documents which is platform independent due to the freely available Acrobat reader The PDF file format is a complex indexed binary format with a specification 600 pages long RML is much easier RGB A way of specifying a color by its Red Green and Blue components Usually used when referring to lights such as on a computer screen RML Report Markup Language An XML dialect created by ReportLab Inc and and used by their software rml2pdf to produce documents in PDF singletons See empty elements Page 96 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 story The part of an RML document where the main content of a document goes if it uses the template stylesheet story form This is where text split into paragraphs by para tags is put stroke In RML the color of the outline of a graphic or text item as opposed to that of its inside or 111 stylesheet This is an obligatory part of an RML document It is where the styles for paragraphs and blockTables are defined though it can be empty template In t
104. numbers may also be negative If this is the case then rml2pdf will count backwards from the end of the last cell So 1 1 is the bottom right hand cell in a table 2 2 is the one up and to the left of that and so on The tags that blockTableStyle can contain are e blockFont blockfont sets the font to be used in a block of your table It has one mandatory attribute name It has four optional attributes size leading start and stop e blockTextColor This sets the color that will be used for the text in a block of your table It has one required attribute colorName It has two optional attributes start and stop e blockLeading This sets the leading that will be used for the text in a block of your table It has one required attribute length It has two optional attributes start and stop e blockAlignment This sets the alignment of the text in a block of your table It has one required attribute value This can be LEFT RIGHT CENTER or CENTRE It has two optional attributes start and stop e blockValign This sets how the contents of a block of cells in your table are aligned in the vertical direction It has one required attribute value This can be TOP MIDDLE or BOTTOM and defaults to BOTTOM It has two optional attributes start and stop e blockLeftPadding This sets the padding i e blank space between the contents of a cell and left hand edge of the cell for a block of cells in your table
105. oForm A form isa group of graphical operations stored together and given a name This allows you to group complex graphics together and to re use them in more than one place with ease To do this you would use the doForm tag Your form would appear in the pageGraphics section of your RML document inside the pageTemplate doForm also appears in pageGraphics section The form tag has one attribute a mandatory one called name which identifies the form The lt doForm gt tag executes the sequence of graphical operations defined with a form tag It also has only one mandatory attribute called name Example lt pageGraphics gt lt form name myForm gt lt drawString x 0 y 24 gt Your graphic operations would go here lt drawString gt lt drawString x 0 y 12 gt There would probably be a lot of them to make up something useful lt drawString gt lt form gt lt doForm name myForm gt lt pageGraphics gt Page 70 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 10 14 Why use forms Why use orms when you can just cut and paste big chunks of text inside your RML document with your favorite text editor or word processor The benefits are dramatically cut file sizes reduced production time and apparently even speeding things up on the printer If you are going to be using PDF files in any situation where people will be downloading them massively reduced file sizes will be appreciated by your users
106. odule mymodule function myfunction data string lt plugInGraphic gt when executed results in effectively the following execution sequence import mymodule mymodule myfunction canvas data string using the current canvas object lt PlugInGraphic gt has two mandatory attributes module and function It is used in the lt pageGraphics gt section of your document plugInFlowable AplugInFlowable identifies a function callable in a module which takes a canvas data string as an argument and returns a flowable object Example lt plugInFlowable module mymodule function myfunction data string lt plugInFlowable gt when executed results in effectively the execution sequence import mymodule flowable mymodule myfunction data string story append flowable using the current canvas object plugInFlowable has two mandatory attributes module and function It is also used in the lt pageGraphics gt section of your document Page 45 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 6 8 Integrating with PageCatcher catchForms doForm and includePdfPages You can use our product PageCatcher to capture individual pages from an external PDF file e g application forms government forms annual reports and so on Extracting the required pages with PageCatcher will most often be a one off design time step Once PageCatcher has extracted a page it archives it in a data file as formatted form data The default name for this file
107. of Contents Whenever a name is referenced before it has been defined the default attribute must be present In order to prevent possible formatting anomalies the default value should be approximately the same size as the expected final value 9 2 Multiple pass pdf formatting RML2PDF resolves names that are referenced before they have been defined by making by default at most two passes through the text If the first pass does not define all names before they have been referenced then RML2PDF formats the document twice On the first pass the default value for any undefined name is used for formatting the document and it may under some circumstances effect the placement of the page breaks On the second the program uses the resolved value determined on the first pass where the name is referenced It is possible to create a chain of references that cannot be resolved such as namedString id a name id b default XXX namedString namedString id b gt lt name id a default XXX namedString In this case RML2PDF will signal an error and fail It is also possible to have a chain of references which requires more than one pass to resolve such as namedString id a gt lt pageNumber gt is where is defined and name id b default XXX namedStrinc namedString id b gt lt pageNumber gt is where B is defined and name id c default XXX namedStrinc namedString id c gt lt pageNumber
108. omething like this example lt stylesheet gt lt initialize gt lt name id YourVariableName value Type anything you want between these quotes initialize stylesheet story para lt b gt lt getName id YourVariableName b para story You can also use the name tag inside the story of a document In this case as well as setting the value for the variable it is also displayed on the page i e the name has a textual value 6 3 Seq seqReset seqChain and SeqFormat The seq in seq lt seqDefault gt and segReset stands for sequence These tags are all used for paragraph numbering or indeed anything that requires numbering items in a sequence such as list items or figures and illustrations This is how they look in use lt seq gt lt seqDefault id myID lt seqReset gt or seqReset id myID gt lt seqChain order id0 idl id2 idn gt lt seqFormat id myID value i gt Each time you call lt seq gt its value is automatically incremented With seqReset the id is an optional attribute However it is still best to use it to save confusion lt seqChain order id0 idl id2 tag is used to make multi sequence use easier When sequence id0 is changed sequence 141 is reset likewise when sequence 141 is changed sequence id2 is reset and so on for the identifiers in the order attribute Page 40 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16
109. ontSize The optional tag specifying the size of the font to be used for the label of the letterboxes textbox or checkBox labelAlignment The optional specifying the alignment of the label may be LEFT RIGHT CENTER or CENTRE labelTextColor An optional attribute specifying the colour to be used for the text of the label of an textBox letterBox or checkBox boxFillColor An optional tag specifying the colour to be used for the background for a textBox letterBox or checkBox boxStrokeColor An optional tag specifying the colour to be used for the lines making up a textBox letterBox or checkBox cellWidth An optional tag specifying the width of a cell in a form element Must be a measurment but may in cm mm or pt see the section on Coordinates and measurements for more details on measurements cellHeight Page 53 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 An optional tag specifying the width of a cell in a form element Must be a measurment but may in cm mm or pt Some Examples As an example of them in use let s set up two boxStyles and see what effect they have on letterBoxes textBoxes and a checkBox Firstly the boxStyles lt boxStyle name speciall labelFontName Helvetica fontSize 10 alignment RIGHT textColor red fontName Helvetica labelFontSize 10 labelAlignment RIGHT labelTextColor blue boxStrokeColor red boxFillColor pink
110. onverts this to a finished document in one step In a dedicated reporting application other components of our toolkit handle data acquisition and preparation of the RML document RML2PDF on its own also fills a key technology gap Our full toolkit relies heavily on the Python scripting language Nevertheless we recognize that IT departments and software houses have their own distinct skill sets and development tools A company may already have developed a rich 3 tier architecture with the key business data in Java or COM objects on an application server All they need is the formatting component They can use exactly the same techniques they use to generate HTML XSLT JSP ASP or anything else to generate an file and the program turns this into a finished document Fast Unlike a number of other formatting languages RML aims squarely at corporate needs Paragraph table and page styles are kept in independent stylesheets allowing reuse and global changes across a family of documents The table model has been designed for efficient rendering of business data And a plug in architecture lets you easily develop and add in custom vector graphics or page templates within the same tool set RML2PDF can also work in tandem with our PageCatcher product PageCatcher is a support tool which extracts graphical elements from PDF files for inclusion in documents generated by RML2PDF or the ReportLab core API Since any external program with the ability
111. or para If you do rmD2pdf will assume that they are tags and attempt to interpret them Since they won t be valid RML tags you will just end up getting an error message along the lines of Error Start tag for undeclared element lt YourNonValidTag gt To get around this you should use entities When you need to use replace it with amp lt when you need to use replace it with amp gt and when you need to use amp replace it with amp amp 8 5 Aliases Aliases allow you to assign more than one name to a paragraph style The alias tag has two required attributes id and value Example alias id alreadyDefinedStyleName value myNewStyleName This can be useful in a number of ways You can give a more descriptive name to a style So you can define a number of paragraph styles called things like ItalicBold or DesignerOneParagraphStyleTwo inthe stylesheet for your document You can then assign aliases to these styles using names that describe the role they fill in your document such as pictureCaption abstract acknowledgement and so If at any point you decide to change the style for that kind of paragraph you can then change it in one alias rather than in every individual paragraph that uses that style 6 6 CDATA unparsed character data CDATA is standard XML tag which indicates to the parser in this case rml2pdf to ignore anything inside the CDATA section It shouldn t
112. para is parent attribute Once you have defined a style using a paraStyle tag you can use those settings as a basis for other styles parent allows one style to inherit from another The other attribute that isn t shared by the para tagis backColor As you can probably guess this attribute sets a background color for the paragraph it is describing The following optional attributes for paraStyle are the same as those for the para tag you can find more description of them in the Advanced text section below fontName fontSize leading leftIndent rightIndent firstLineIndent alignment spaceBefore spaceAfter bulletFontName bulletFontSize bulletIndent textColor Here is an example of how the lt stylesheet gt tag might look in use lt stylesheet gt lt initialize gt lt alias id style normal value style Normal gt lt initialize gt lt paraStyle name h1 Page 29 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 fontName Courier Bold fontSize 12 spaceBefore 0 5 cm gt lt paraStyle name stylel fontName Courier fontSize 10 gt lt paraStyle name style2 parent stylel leftIndent lin gt lt paraStyle name style7 parent stylel leading 15 leftIndent lin rightIndent lin gt stylesheet stylesheets also allow you to define styles for other tags you can define styles for blockTables with the lt blockTableStyle gt tag or the various for
113. passed to it the co ordinates for the bottom left hand corner its width and height It also has optional 111 and stroke attributes and a round attribute which tell it if the corners should be rounded off The circle needs the following attributes passed to it the x and y co ordinates of the point where its center should be its radius The ellipse needs the following attributes passed to it the x and y co ordinates of the point where its center should be its width and height If you imagine the ellipse inside a rectangle the x and y attributes give the co ordinates for the bottom left hand corner and the width and height attributes give the co ordinates for the top right hand corner of the box shapes also have two optional attributes fill which tells the parser if the shape should be filled in or not and stroke which tells it if the shape should have its outline displayed Both these attributes take Boolean values as arguments You can uses either 1 or yes to set them as on or 0 or no to set them as off The following example shows various combinations of attributes for each of the basic shapes Notice how this example starts with the XML definition you can get away with not using it but it is still better to make sure it is there Page 16 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 Simple Text and Graphics with RML Figure 27 Output from EXAMPLE 3 EXAMPLE 3 lt xml version
114. pecified by x4 y4 The line segment from x1 y1 to x2 y2 forms a tangent to the curve The line segment from x3 y3 to x4 y4 also forms a tangent to the curve If you look at an illustration of a Bezier curve you will see that the curve is entirely contained within the convex figure with its vertices at the control points Example template lt pageTemplate id main gt lt pageGraphics gt lt curves gt 198 560 198 280 396 280 396 560 lt curves gt lt pageGraphics gt Page 59 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 frame id first x1 0 5in 1 0 5 width 20cm height 28cm pageTemplate template 10 2 paths To connect lines and curves you need to use the path tag This allows you to make complex figures Like the other graphics in RML path lives in lt pageGraphics gt section at the start of the document Initially you must give path tag x attributes to tell it the co ordinates for the point where this path is going to start You may also at the same time give it attributes called stroke and fill which do the same as their counterparts for the basic shapes such as rect and circle and an additional one called close If the close attribute is set to yes or 1 then once the path is completed the stroke is finished off by painting a line from the last point given to the first point enclosing the figure The path tag has its paired lt path gt
115. r Guide Revision 1 16 Using styles with form field elements As we ve already mentioned checkBox textBox and letterBoxes all allow you to re use styles in a similar way to the way you can re use styles with paragraphs with the boxStyle tag Like the other style tags paraStyle andblockTableStyle boxStyle livesin the stylesheet section near the start of your document boxStyle style can have the following attributes name This is the required attribute which allows you to refer this style by name alias An optional attribute which allows you to refer to your style by another name parent If this is supplied it must refer to the name of another style This style with then inherit from the style named fontName An optional attribute this refers to the font to be used for the main contents of letterboxes or a textbox it is ignored for checkBoxes fontSize This optional attribute sets the size for the main contents of letterboxes or a textbox it is ignored for checkBoxes alignment For letterboxes or a textbox this optional attribute sets the alignment of the contents of the box It may be either LEFT RIGHT CENTER or CENTRE It is ignored for checkBoxes textColor An optional attribute that sets the colour for the main contents in the letterboxes or textbox labelFontName The optional tag specifying the font to be used for the label of the letterboxes textbox or checkBox labelF
116. re beige bisque black blanchedalmond blue blueviolet brown burlywood cadetblue chartreuse chocolate coral cornflower cornsilk crimson cyan darkblue darkcyan darkgoldenrod darkgray darkgreen darkkhaki darkmagenta darkolivegreen darkorange darkorchid Page 90 of 123 Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex xFOFSFF xFAEBD7 xOOFFFF x FFFDA4 xFOFFFF xF5F5DC xFFEACA x000000 XFFEBCD x0000FF 8 2 2 52 2 xDEB887 x5FO9EAO0 7 xD2691E xFF7F50 xX6495ED xFFF8DC xDC143C xOOFFFF x00008B x008B8B xB8860B XA9A9A9 x006400 xBDB76B x8B008B x556B2F xFF8COO x9932CC RML User Guide AA MED INO 0100 6 00 jejelale aa Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 darkred darksalmon darkseagreen darkslateblue darkslategray darkturquoise darkviolet deeppink deepskyblue dimgray dodgerblue firebrick floralwhite forestgreen fuchsia gainsboro ghostwhite gold goldenrod gray g
117. rey same as green greenyellow honeydew hotpink indianred indigo ivory khaki lavender lavenderblush lawngreen lemonchiffon lightblue Page 91 of 123 Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Hex Revision 1 16 x8B0000 xE9967A x8FBC8B x483D8B x2F4F4F x00CEDI x9400D3 1493 xOOBFFF x696969 xlE90FF xB22222 xFFFAFO x228B22 xFFOOFF xDCDCDC xF8F8FF xFFD700 520 x808080 x808080 x008000 xADFF2F xFOFFFO xFF69B4 xCD5C5C x4B0082 xFFFFFO xFOE68C 6 6 xFFFOF5 00 xFFFACD xADD8E6 RML User Guide THES os FILE O10 018 00 8 0 6 61416416 61916016 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 Text 123 lightcoral lightcyan lightgoldenrodyellow lightgreen lightgrey lightpink lightsalmon lightseagreen lightskyblue lightslategray lightsteelblue lightyellow lime limegreen linen magenta maroon mediumaquamarine mediumblue mediumorchid mediumpurple mediumseagreen mediumslateblue mediumspr
118. rkup Language The language used for writing pages on the World Wide Web image In RML the image tag allows you to use existing graphics files in your document Currently image supports the GIF and JPEG formats the two most common formats on the World Wide Web Most paint applications support both the GIF and JPEG standards see also bitmap GIF JPEG JPEG A lossy compression technique for color images created by the Joint Photographic Experts Group JPEG Better for photos than the GIF format it can use up to 24 bit color and reduce file sizes to about 596 of their normal size JPEG files are widely used on the World Wide Web and many other places The JPEG format is sometimes known as JFIF JFI and JPG as well as JPEG You can use JPEG files in your RML document with the image tag see also bitmap gif image jpg See JPEG leading Leading pronounced ledding is the amount of vertical space allotted for a line of type the distance between the baseline of one line to the baseline of the next The name comes from the way that printers used to use thin strips of lead or brass to separate the lines of metal type In RML leading can be supplied as an attribute for the para and paraStyle tags It is expressed as the height of the line plus the space between lines So for example using a 12 point font with a leading of 18 gives you a space between lines of 6 points You can also have negative leading By giving a
119. roscopic and enlarge it you may end up just getting a blob due to the width of the lines being scaled up as well e Another thing to remember is that these transformations are incremental in a series of transforms each one will modify the output of the one before it So the order you carry the operations out in is very important The result of the sequence translate rotate scale is very different to that of scale rotate translate e If performing multiple operations use the order translate rotate gt scale or skew whenever possible Using a different order may result in the axes being distorted or other results that lead to an ugly output that isn t what you were trying to do 10 10 Bitmapped images RML also allows you to insert pre existing images into your PDF files If you have a graphic file in either the gif or jpg format you can use the image tag to insert it into your document The image tag goes in the lt pageGraphics gt section at the head of your RML document It has 5 attributes 3 of which are mandatory and two of which are optional The file attribute tells rml2pdf the name of the input file that you want to incorporate into your document the x and y attributes give the co ordinates for the bottom left hand corner of where the image will be placed on the page The optional width and height attributes allow you to specify how big it should be on the page this means that you can over ride the normal siz
120. ross the image and block the light from millions of more stars yet further across our Galaxy para pto 6 6 More about stylesheets Just like in a word processor RML allows you to define a stylesheet at the start of your document and then apply it to paragraphs later on This means that you can define a complicated mixture of settings that you want to apply to paragraphs only define it in one place and refer to it with a simple name at the start of each paragraph rather than having to type or cut and paste large blocks of text over and over for each paragraph Each stylesheet starts with the lt stylesheet gt tag There may then be an optional initialisation section where aliases can be set bounded by the pair of tags lt initialize gt lt initialize gt After that come a number of lt paraStyle gt tags each one defining a style that you want to use for paragraphs The lt paraStyle gt tag must have an attribute name and then may have as many optional attributes as you want each one setting one feature of the appearance of a paragraph Each one of these lt paraStyle gt tags is an empty element i e it is closed with a gt rather than a separate closing tag but you might want to indent the tag so that each of the options is on a separate line This makes it easier to see what each style is defining see the example below for how this looks One attribute for paraStyle that isn t the same as those used by
121. row td and td enclose each individual cell from Table Data So the simplest blockTable in RML will look something like this lt blockTable gt lt tr gt lt td gt This lt td gt lt td gt is lt td gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt a lt td gt lt td gt blockTable lt td gt lt tr gt lt blockTable gt This produces a table that looks like this This is a blockTable Figure 43 A very simple blockTable In this short example we are just using plain old vanilla text in the table cells But we can do more lt blocktable gt allows you to use paragraphs and the lt para gt tag This means that you can use bold italics colors fonts greek anything you can use in a paragraph And you can use multiple paragraphs inside a table cell This is a more complex This is a more complex blockTable blockTable This is a more This 15 amp more complex complex blockTable blockTafle Figure 44 A slightly more complex blockTable The main thing that makes this slightly more complex than a very simple table is the fact that you must give rowHeights andcolWidths tothe lt blockTable gt to use paras This makes sense paragraphs fit into the available space on a page In a table they must fit into the available space in that cell If you haven t defined how high and wide that cell will be then there is no way for rml2pdf to know how to make it flow in that cell If you get an error message saying Flowables cell
122. rs like for application forms and similar cases Sometimes though these fields are already filled in by some computational process and the user might only need to sign the entire form before leaving it with a bank clerk or sending it off to some destination RML supports creating both kind of reports by providing a set of special purpose tags to create such form elements or fields widgets quite easily These tags are named lt checkBox gt lt textBox gt and lt letterBoxes gt and are described in the rest of this section All these form elements share a lot of features when it comes to what they look like in the document They all appear as a rectangular shape with some background and border colour plus some width for the border itself They also have some sort of text label attached to this rectangle to describe the field s purpose in the context of the report to the human reader The text inside the field as well as the one in the attached label also should have the usual properties like fontname and size and colour All form field elements have a boxStyle attribute that can be used to group attribute names and values and reuse them in many field elements with much less typing effort But there are also specific features that distinguish these form elements from each other A checkbox does not contain text but only a cross when checked and a textbox contains one or more lines of text with different possible alignments while letterboxes ar
123. s for automatically resizing the fontsize to shrink the contained text by exactly what is needed to make it fit into the box This is a two step process that first tries to shrink the fontsize to make the text fit horizontally If that is not enough it is further shrinked to make it also fit vertically This process is controlled using the attribute shrinkToFit Because human readers are very sensible to reading text and get quickly irritated when it does not feel right there is a default amount of space 1 point left between the text and any of the borders of the box which will be respected by the resizing mechanism This is hardcoded now but might become another attribute in the future Page 49 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 The following code creates a row of sample textboxes illustrating different values for the most relevant attributes as well as the auto resizing text feature lt textBox x 0cm y 0cm boxWidth 3cm boxHeight 1cm label labeled textbox gt some text lt textBox gt lt textBox x 3 5cm y 0cm boxWidth 3cm boxHeight 1cm boxFillColor yellow boxStrokeColor blue label colorful textbox gt some text lt textBox gt lt textBox x 7cm y 0cm lineWidth 0 1cm boxWidth 3cm boxHeight 1cm boxFillColor yellow boxStrokeColor blue label bold textbox gt some text lt textBox gt lt textBox x 10 5cm y 0cm boxWidth 3cm boxHeight 1cm lineWidth 0 1cm boxFillColor yellow
124. s set up so that it recognises that a file with a py or pyc extension is a Python script and automatically uses Python to execute it If this is not the case try typing the following prompt python rml2pdf pyc filename rml After completing successfully the rml2pdf program will respond with a single line which lists a path to the PDF output file generated by the program as specified in the file s RML text directory outputfilename pdf Calling RML2PDF from Python For installations which have the Python module style of installation RML2PDF can also be called directly from a Python program using the rml2pdf go entry point The go function has the following interface def go xmlInputText outputFileName None outDir None dtdDir None The xml input text must be a string which contains the RML specification for the PDF document to be generated The output file name when specified overrides any output file name specified in the xml input text The output directory parameter when present specifies the directory in which to place the output file and the optional DTD directory parameter specifies the directory containing the DTD for the current version of RML It is also possible to call rml2pdf from other programming languages such as C by using standard methods for calling a python callable See the Python Language Embedding and Extension manuals For further information regarding the installation of your version of RML2PDF please
125. s what happens on pages with only one frame On pages that have multiple frames this tag acts as a conditional frame break If the space in the current frame isn t enough it will break and place what follows in the next frame rather than on the next page The tag and its syntax still remain the same This tag is particularly useful with large tables where you want the whole table to be presented on one page rather than split between two It can also be used where you have a collection of images and you want them all to be on the same page lt condPageBreak gt has only one attribute the mandatory one of height Examples condPageBreak height lin condPageBreak height 72 gt 6 4 storyPlace out of band flowables The lt storyPlace gt container is a flowable story that s placed This allows for dynamically specified frames to be constructed in the story This tag is like having an illustration amp place combination although you cannot separate an illustration from its frame as you can with lt storyPlace gt storyPlace takes 4 required attributes and one optional one x and are the x and y co ordinates for where you want the flowables placed width and height are the width and height of the flowable Finally the origin be one of pagelframellocal If not specified local is assumed The origin attribute specifies where the x and y attributes are based Examples lt storyPlace x 0 y 0 width 18c
126. sTemplate gt lt includePdfPages filename mypdffile pdf pages 1 2 3 gt lt setNextTemplate name myNormalTemplate gt lt nextFrame gt lt para gt This text appears on the next normal non included page of your document lt para gt This snippet switches to a new page template for use with your included pages adds in the first three pages from your PDF file switches back to what is presumably the template you have been using throughout the rest of the document and outputs a line of text into the next normal page of your document If you don t want any headers or footers behind your PDF pages define a page template called something like blank in the template section at the head pf your document with a single frame and no decoration on it and use that If you are content for your included pages to appear over the template you have been using on the previous pages if the included pages don t have any headers and footers and have large enough margins not clash with the ones you are using in your document for example then you can skip both of the setNext Template tags completely The nextFrame tag is used because the includedPdfPages places you at the top of the last included PDF page This allows you to flow paragraphs or other flowables down your last page This may be useful if you want to place text in a form or use some other pre prepared background for your text If all you want to do is just drop in a pre made page
127. see the release notes and README that come with the package Page 6 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 1 3 What is RML RML is the Report Markup Language a member of the XML family of languages and the XML dialect used by rml2pdf to produce documents in Adobe s Portable Document Format PDF RML documents can be written automatically by a program or manually using any word processor that can output text files e g using a Save as Text option from the save menu Since RML documents are basic text files they can be created on the fly by scripts in Python Perl or almost any other language RML makes creating documents in PDF as simple as creating a basic web page RML is as easy to write as HTML and uses tags just like HTML It is much easier than trying to write PDF programmatically 1 4 What is this document This document is a user guide and tutorial for RML It deals with RML Version 1 0 as specified in the RML 1 0 DTD rml 1 O dtd If your installation of RML uses a later version you will need a later version of the DTD and of this tutorial Look on the ReportLab website http www reportlab com for more details This document has been generated from RML If you need another example of RML in action look at the file rml user guide rml to see how this file was produced NOTE This is not the final definitive version of the documentation for this package at the present moment in time both RML and this docu
128. t ftr lt blockTable gt 11 2 Block table attributes This is useful but there s a lot more to blockTables than that The actual lt blockTable gt tag can have number of optional attributes e style blockTables can have a style set in the stylesheet in the same way as paragraphs can If you have set a style for your blockTable you can refer to it by name with this attribute and apply it to your table More details on how to do it appear in the section on the lt blockTableStyle gt tag below e colWidths If you use this attribute it takes a comma separated list of the width of each column in your blockTable This allows you to vary the widths to match the width of the content of each column If you do use it you should be careful to make sure that there is one width given for every column in your table e rowHeights As colWidths is to columns rowHeights is to rows It also takes a comma separated list in this case for the heights of the rows in your table e repeatRows If you have a large table that splits over multiple pages you may well want certain information appearing on all of them Column headers are one example of this sort of information The repeatRows attribute allows you to do this repeatRows takes one single number as an argument the rows up to and including this row are repeated as headers on each section of the table that appears on a new page Page 74 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16
129. the contents for lt b gt column one lt b gt lt para gt lt para gt It uses the default style for paragraph lt para gt lt para gt Does it come out OK lt para gt lt para gt There now follows some random text to see how these paragraphs look with longer content lt para gt lt para gt Blah blah morale blah benchmark blah blah blah blah blah blah communication blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah stretch the envelope blah blah blah lt para gt lt para gt Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah architect blah inter active backward compatible blah blah blah blah blah Blah blah blah blah value added lt para gt lt para gt Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah re factoring phase blah knowledge management blah blah Blah blah blah blah interactive blah vision statement blah para para Blah blah blah blah blah blah conceptualize blah downsize blah blah blah blah Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah synergy client centered vision statement para para Blah blah dysfunctional blah blah blah blah blah blah blah appropriate blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah re factoring go the extra mile blah blah blah blah para nextFrame condPageBreak height 144 lt h2 gt lt getName id ColumnTwoHeader gt lt h2 gt lt para style body gt Page 35 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 Th
130. this line of text This is courier in crimson 7 5 Superscripts and subscripts Another thing you can do inside the story is using superscripts and subscripts You do this with the super super and lt sub gt lt sub gt tags Superscript is where the text is raised up on the line such as in the mathematical symbol for squared or cubed and subscript is where it is lowered relative to the rest of the line in the same way Example para lt sub gt This is subscript sub This is normal text lt super gt This is superscript lt super gt lt para gt That example produces this M This iss script This is normal text 5 5 This is subscript Page 32 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 7 6 Using multiple frames If you have split your page into more than one frame you can flow text between frames To do this you use the nextFrame tag This is an empty or singleton tag it has no options and doesn t take any content Put in nextFrame and your text will continue into the next frame It should appear outside your paragraphs between one lt para gt and next para tag If you have defined more than one kind of template by using pageTemplate in the template section at the head of the RML document you can also force RML into using a new template for the next page You do this by using the setNextTemplate tag This tag has only one attribute the manda
131. tory one of name which tells RML which template it should use In practice you would usually set the next template and then use a next Frame lt setNextTemplate name yetAnotherTemplate gt lt nextFrame gt 7 7 Preformated text pre and xpre One tag that is also a flowable but that can t be used inside the lt para gt lt para gt tags is lt pre gt Just as in HTML the lt pre gt tag denotes pre formatted text It displays text exactly as you typed it with the line breaks exactly where you put them and no line wrapping If you want to keep any formatting in your text such as tabs and extra whitespace enclose itin lt pre gt tags rather than para tags You can also pass a style to the gt lt tag If you don t use the optional style attribute anything between the pre tagandthe pre tag will appear in the default style for pre formatted text This uses a fixed width typewriter font such as courier and is useful for things such as program listings but may not be what you want for your quotation or whatever If you have already defined a style in the the stylesheet section of your document then you can make the pre tag use this for your pre formatted text Example pre style myStyle this is pre formatted text pre The xpre is similar to the pre tag in that it preserves line breaks where they are placed in the text but xpre also permits paragraph annotations such as bol
132. ve the characters insidethe lt gt section Page 12 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 3 Basic Text Operations 3 1 Coordinates and measurements In RML the page origin is in the bottom left hand corner 0 0 Any point on the page can be specified by a pair of numbers a pair of X Y co ordinates The X co ordinate states how far to the right the point is and the Y co ordinate states how far up it is When an RML element has co ordinates the co ordinate origin is the lower left corner In the case of elements in a pageGraphic the origin of the lower left corner of the page For elements within an illustration the origin is the lower left corner of the bounding box declared by the illustration These co ordinates and any other measurements in an RML document can be given in one of four units Inches use the term in centimetres use the term cm and millimetres use the term mm If no unit is specified RML will assume that you are giving a measurement in points one point is 1 72 of an inch You can also explicitly use points with the term pt As an example the following pairs of co ordinates all refer to the same point Notice that there is no space between the number and any unit that follows it 4 5 lin 11 43cm 2 54cm 324 72 You can mix and match these units within RML though it generally isn t a good idea to do so The co ordinate pair 3 5in 3 5cm is valid and won t confus
133. vetica BoldOblique fontSize 10 textColor white alignment CENTER gt lt stylesheet gt lt story gt lt title gt Example 12 images and padding in tables lt title gt spacer length 1cm gt lt blockTable style myBlockTableStyle rowHeights 166 28 166 28 166 28 Page 85 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 colWidths 161 161 161 gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt tr gt lt td gt lt illustration width 141 height 90 gt lt image file images replogo gif x 0 y 0 width 141 height 90 gt lt stroke color deepskyblue gt lt lineMode width 3 gt lt lines gt 00 141 0 141 0 141 90 141 90 0 90 0 90 0 0 lines illustration td lt td gt lt illustration width 141 height 90 gt lt image file images replogo gif x 0 y 0 width 141 height 90 gt lt stroke color deepskyblue gt lt lineMode width 3 gt lt lines gt 00 141 0 141 0 141 90 141 90 0 90 09000 lt lines gt lt illustration gt lt td gt lt td gt lt illustration width 141 height 90 gt lt image file images replogo gif x 0 y 0 width 141 height 90 gt lt stroke color deepskyblue gt lt lineMode width 3 gt lt lines gt 00 141 0 141 O 141 90 141 90 0 90 0 90 0 0 lines illustration td td para style paddingTableStyle gt lt b gt blockLeftPadding lt b gt with lt b gt blockBottomPadding lt para gt lt td gt lt t
134. wRight String gt lt drawCentredString x 523 y 800 gt This is a drawCentredString example lt drawCentredString gt To set the font that you want a piece of text to be you need to use the lt setFont gt tag This has two arguments which are required you need to give it the name of the font and the size you want it displayed at A setFont tag looks like this lt setFont name Helvetica Bold size 17 gt Page 14 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 To use all the drawString commands you need to use a tag called lt pageGraphics gt This tag appears at the start of a RML document in the pageTemplate section pageGraphics are the graphics that have to do with a whole page rather than just individual illustrations as we will see later pageGraphics can be used to provide a background to a page to place captions or other textual information on a page or to provide logos or other colorful elements Whatever you use them for they are always anchored to a spot on the page they do not wrap or flow with any text you might put into paragraphs Page 15 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 4 Basic figures lines and shapes 4 1 Rect circle and ellipse As well as allowing you to place text on the page pageGraphics also allows you to place shapes and graphics on it The basic types of shape that RML allows you to use are rect rectangle circle and ellipse rect needs to have a list of attributes
135. with a gt at the end of the same tag rather than having a separate closing tag e g getName id Header Title doesn thavea separate lt getName gt tag the gt serves to close it so it doesn t need one Empty elements are also sometimes known as singletons fill In RML the color that a graphic or text item is filled with as opposed to that of its outline or stroke flowables In RML flowables are items which appear in a story such as paragraph spacer and tables Flowables are positioned in sequence running down a frame until there is no more room left in that frame when they are placed in the next frame or on the next page if necessary They can not be mixed with graphics Flowables include the following tags blockTable title hl h2 h3 spacer illustration pre andplugInFlowable see also graphics GIF GIF Graphics Interchange Format is a bit mapped graphics file format created by CompuServe in 1987 It is still in common use on the World Wide Web and many other places today You can use gifs in your RML document with the image tag see also bitmap JPEG image graphics Page 95 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 In RML graphics are items which can appear inside the pageGraphics andillustration tags Unlike flowables graphics are explicitly positioned on the page by co ordinates They can not be mixed with flowables see also flowables HTML The Hyper Text Ma
136. xis They are optional to allow you to only give one of the pair so moving the origin in only one direction Examples translate dx 55 dyz 91 translate dx lin translate dyz 6 5cm This is what a translation with a dx of 50 of 50 looks like 50 pt Original dx 50 dy 50 Figure 37 An example of the lt translate gt tag in use And this is slightly simplified version of the relevant bit of RML lt illustration gt lt lines gt 16 40 116 40 16 40 16 140 156 40 256 40 156 40 156 140 lt lines gt lt setFont name Times Roman size 12 gt lt fill color black gt lt drawCentredString x 58 y 12 gt Original lt drawCentredString gt lt setFont name Helvetica Bold size 50 gt fill color red gt lt drawString x 16 y 41 gt x lt drawString gt lt translate dx 142 gt Page 63 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 setFont name Times Roman size 8 gt fill color lightgray gt drawCentredString x 58 y 18 gt 50 pt drawCentredString setFont name Times Roman size 12 gt fill color black gt drawCentredString 58 y 12 gt dx 50 dy 50 lt drawCentredString gt This is relative to the origin of the black lines in the illustration which is why it doesn t match the actual translate performed it is what the translate would be if the origin was at 15 40 gt setFont name Helvetica Bold size 50 fill color
137. yes or no though 1 or 0 are also allowed The fill and stroke tags do a different job The only argument that these tags are allowed is a color If there no fill or stroke tags in a document both the fill and the stroke for all shapes default to black If youhavea fill tag before a shape it allows you to change the color that that shape is filled with Similarly a stroke tag before a shape allows you to set the color that the outline of that shape will be drawn in If there is no fill or stroke tag in front of a shape it will be filled and stroked with the most recently defined 111 orstroke or failing that the default black This means that you can use one fill tag to refer to many shapes while changing the stroke for each of them Or vice versa Another brief example of how the 111 and stroke tags look fill color olivedrab gt stroke color khaki gt 4 3 Lines and lineMode The other basic drawing element is the line To draw a simple line you use the lines tag For each line you want to draw you pass lines two pairs of X Y co ordinates one pair of co ordinates for the start point of the line the other for the end point If you want to draw more than one line you can keep passing lines more sets of 4 co ordinates lines then draws those other separate lines on the page The lines ina lt lines gt command are just lumped together in one lines tag for your convenience If you want l
138. you can use with lines and lineMode Notice how you can use more that one attribute to lt 1 gt at the same time EXAMPLE 4 lt xml version 1 0 encoding iso 8859 1 standalone no gt lt DOCTYPE document SYSTEM rml 1 0 dtd gt document filename example 4 pdf template lt pageTemplate id main gt lt pageGraphics gt lt fill color red gt lt setFont name Helvetica size 24 gt lt drawCentredString x 297 5 y 800 gt Lines in RML lt drawCentredString gt notice that each of these empty tags are teminated gt lt with a slash gt lt lineMode width 1 gt lt lines gt lin 10 5in 2in 10 5in 2in 10 5in 1 5in 10in 1 5in l 5in 10 75in lines fill color black gt setFont name Helvetica size 9 gt lt drawCentredString x 1 5 in yz 9 75 gt width 1 drawCentredString lt lineMode width 5 gt lt lines gt 2 5in 10 5in 3 5in 10 5in 3 5in 10 5in 3in 10in 3in 10in 3in 10 75in lt lines gt lt drawCentredString x 3 in y 9 75 in gt width 5 lt drawCentredString gt lt lineMode width 10 gt lt lines gt 4in 10 5in 5in 10 5in 5in 10 5in 4 5in 10in 4 5in 10in 4 5in 10 75in lines drawCentredString x 4 5 in yz 9 75 in gt width 10 Page 21 of 123 RML User Guide Revision 1 16 drawCentredString lineMode width 15 lt lines gt 5 5in 10 5in 6 5in 10 5in 6 5in 1

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