Printing forms and labels in Python

[Monte Milanuk]

On 6/13/10 8:00 AM, Joel Goldstick wrote:

> Why not go the other direction. Use python to do your processing, and
> send the results to excel. There are python modules that read and write
> excel files.

Well... partly because Excel is not exactly cross-platform.  Granted, 
the mass majority of people using a program like I have in mind will be 
doing so on Windows, but I was hoping to *not* tie things to any one 
platform if I could avoid it.  Probably an overly ambitious goal at this 
point.

The other part... maybe its my relative newbie experience level showing 
here, but having to call/open Excel to print something from a python app 
feels a little like admitting that python can't do it in a reasonable 
manner.  If I wanted to have to open Excel to print out the results, I 
think I'd just as soon spend the effort and make the whole thing an 
Excel/VBA app and skip python entirely.

Perhaps (probably) I'm not understanding some of how the lower level 
systems stuff works here...  I thought the print drivers were there to 
take care of the low-level device-specific communication, and provide a 
somewhat simplified common interface for regular programs like M$ Word, 
Open Office, Adobe Reader, etc. to use.  Those programs don't access the 
hardware directly, do they?  Don't they hand off the print job to the 
OS-specific print drivers, and let them handle the spooling, etc.?  From 
my (admittedly limited) understanding of things on Windows, Mac & Linux, 
that seems to be somewhat common between platforms. Isn't there some 
sort of module in Python to do the same?  I could understand it needing 
to be somewhat *platform* specific, perhaps... but I have old copies of 
M$ Office 2003 printing out just duckily on printers that only came out 
on the market less than a year ago.  I updated the printer drivers and 
changed the default printer, but nothing printer-related in Word or 
Excel changed (that I know of)... but it still manages to hand off to 
the operating system print drivers just fine... which is kind of what I 
figured Python would do.

Is that (to some degree) what ReportLab does?

TIA,

Monte