burocracy 0.4

=========
Burocracy
=========

Burocracy is a library that allows you to use .docx templates as
templates using MailMerge fields and can save them as docx's or pdfs. It
can insert plain text, images, tables and (simple) HTML. See
`django-bureaucracy`_ for some mild django integration.

WIP: PPTX as templates.

Usage
=====

Example
-------

.. code-block::

from bureaucracy import DocxTemplate, HTML, Image, Table

doc = DocxTemplate('examples/sample.docx')

context = {
'table': Table(data=[['this is the first cell of the first row', 'this is the second cell of the first row'],
['the second row', 'etc'],
['etc', 'etc]],
headers=['header 1', 'header 2']),
'image': Image('pigeon.jpg')
'html': HTML(<p><strong>bold</strong>-notbold</p><ul><li>hop</li><li>la</li><li>kee</li></ul>")
'text': 'some text',
}

doc.render_and_save('generated.docx', context)
doc.render_and_save('generated.pdf', context, format='pdf')


Inserting mail merge fields
---------------------------

Bureaucracy expects the .docx-files passed to the ``DocxTemplate`` constructor
to contain MailMerge fields whose names correspond to the ones used
in the context dict. How this is done exactly depends on the version of
Office you have, but it seems that it's always a variation on
Insert > Field > Mail Merge > Mergefield and then entering the name:

.. figure:: docs/mailmerge_mac.png?raw=true
:alt: Mailmerge on Mac

What it looks like on Office Mac 2015


Installation
============

.. code-block:: bash

pip install burocracy


Note that although this will install the pypandoc dependency, that package
makes use of the pandoc executable whose installation sometimes fails.
To work around this, install pandoc on it's own with your favorite package
manager and make it available on the path.

For the pdf generation, bureaucracy needs the LibreOffice ``soffice`` executable
to be installed and on the path.


.. _django-bureacracy: https://bitbucket.org/maykinmedia/django-bureaucracy