Frequently Asked Question
How to install and use the xtopdf PDF creation/conversion toolkit (WINDOWS!)
Filed in category Conversion to/from PDF
This is the install procedure for Windows; the install prodecure for Linux will be added later on.
- Get Python v2.4.3 here
It is not more than 10 MB. Install it - its an MSI, so just double-click. Note that any Python version >= 2.2 will work for xtopdf. - Get Reportlab open source version 1.21 here
The size is not more than 3 MB. Please don't use ReportLab 2.0 although it is available; xtopdf is not tested with it. ReportLab 1.21 is the latest stable version in the version 1 series.
Install it following the instructions in the README file.
It should be straightforward. The main points to take care of are:- First, before installing ReportLab, run Python once
You may have to add the directory where Python got installed, say C:\Python24, to your PATH variable first). Once that directory is added to your PATH (preferably via Control Panel), open a DOS prompt.
At this prompt, type:python
This should start the Python interpreter. You will get a one or two line message with the Python version, and then the Python interpreter prompt. - At this prompt, type the following two lines:
import sys
print sys.path
This should display a list of all the dirs. that are in the Python PATH - an internal Python variable that gets set automatically, upon startup of the interpreter, to a set of default dirs. This variable is analogous to the DOS PATH variable. In this list of dirs, look for "C:\Python24\lib\site-packages" as one of the dirs. It should be there by default.
- First, before installing ReportLab, run Python once
- Now install Reportlab:
Unzip the ReportLab_1_21.tgz file with WinZip, into some folder, say c:\reportlab.
This will create a folder called either:- reportlab_1.21 with a folder called reportlab under it
- or just a folder called reportlab.
If (2), then move the reportlab folder to under C:\Python24\Lib\site-packages.
The above steps should make ReportLab work.
An alternative way is to just unzip the reportlab .tgz file into some folder, say, C:\RL, and then create a file called, say, reportlab.pth, which contains just one line - the path to this folder where the extracted contents get stored.e.g. C:\RL\reportlab . Please check that step out (in the ReportLab .tgz file's README file for the exact details). - After the above steps, check if Reportlab works
Go to a DOS prompt again, run python again as before, and then at the Python prompt, enter either or both of the following commands (on separate lines):
import reportlab
from reportlab import pdfgen
If either or both of these above commands work (and if there is no error message), it means that Reportlab is properly installed. - Now you can install xtopdf
Get xtopdf here; click on the green rectangle which says "Download Conversion of other formats to PDF".
After downloading the file, unzip it into a folder, say c:\temp. This will create a folder called xtopdf-1.0 under C:\temp. Go to that folder.
There are many Python programs here with extension .py.
To run, e.g., WritePDF.py, do this:
python WritePDF.py some_file.txt
This will run it and the output will be a file called some_file.pdf.
Try opening it in Adobe Reader.
Similarly try running some more programs:
python DBFReader.py test1.dbf(or test2.dbf or test3.dbf or test4.dbf - all of which are in the package)
This should read the DBF file and display its metadata (file header and field headers) and data records to standard output - the screen.
python DBFToPDF.py test1.dbf test1.pdf
This should do the same as the above (DBFReader.py), except that instead of the output going to the screen, it will go to a file called test1.pdf.
And so on, try out a few others. Most of all of the programs can be run as "python prog_name.py". Some require one or more command-line arguments (all of them require at least one command-line argument, at least an input file).
Some of them give usage messages if you run them without any
command-line arguments, but this is not necessarily the case for all of them, nor are the messages always user-friendly enough - this will probably be fixed in the next release. (Developers who have at least a working knowledge of Python should be easily able to figure out the usage, though, just by reading the start of the main() function for each program - the part where the code checks the command-line arguments.)
You should be able to run at least a few of them like this.
Be sure to try running this one also:
python PDFBook.py book1.pdf book1.txt
This one reads a list of chapter file names (where each chapter is one .txt file) and corresponding chapter titles, from the 2nd argument book1.txt, and creates a PDF e-book out of all the chapters combined, using the chapter title as the heading for each page.
