[texhax] Tex and LaTex vs. ReportLab (http://www.reportlab.org/)

[William Adams]

On Dec 21, 2006, at 8:43 PM, hgi at shaw.ca wrote:

> I started a newsletter at our large government organization, mainly  
> for
> Executive and everyone loves it.  The distribution list is expanding
> constantly.
>
> Of course content is one secret to success with a newsletter.   
> However, one
> huge plus is that it looks so darn GREAT -  it is written in  
> LaTex.  I love
> LaTex.  It has so many options and there is so much that you can do  
> with Tex
> and LaTex.
>
> Our Systems Admin is interested in the possibility of converting our
> newsletter into Python-based ReportLab.  He is a Python guy (not  
> that this
> is the main consideration in what he is suggesting).
>
> So I am wondering, objectively are there merits of Tex and LaTex  
> over using
> ReportLab?

You said yourself that TeX / LaTeX output looks great --- the samples  
I'm seeing at http://www.reportlab.org/ strike me as pretty  
pedestrian. I'm not seeing any hyphenation and the text setting isn't  
much.

The emphasis in the samples seems to be database integration --- if  
you're doing much of that my choice would be to use ReportLab to  
generate the graphs &c. and then place them into LaTeX where you set  
the text.

William


-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications



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