After collating the various ideas that people have been giving me during the Kickstarter campaign, I have decided to firm up my table of contents. I had already planned to cover 80-90% or more of what was in ReportLab’s user guide, but in more depth, as I thought most of those topics should be covered in book form. The rest of the book was going to be some HOW-TO type chapters and other Python packages that work with PDFs. With that in mind, here is what the table of contents is looking like:

Part I – The ReportLab Toolkit

• Chapter 1 – The Canvas
• Chapter 2 – Fonts
• Chapter 3 – PLATYPUS
• Chapter 4 – Paragraphs
• Chapter 5 – Tables
• Chapter 6 – Other Flowables
• Chapter 7 – Custom Flowables
• Chapter 8 – Charts / Graphs
• Chapter 9 – Other Graphics
• Chapter 10 – PDF Special Features (Forms, Links, Encryption)
• Chapter 11 – Bar Codes / QR Codes

Part II – Tutorials / HOW-Tos

• Chapter 12 – Turning XML into Multipage PDFs
• Chapter 13 – Custom headers and footers, page numbers
• Chapter 14 – Creating a table of contents (Stretch goal) 
• Chapter 15 – Exporting Data from PDFs (pdfminer) (Stretch goal) 
• Chapter 16 – Filling in PDF Forms with Python (pdfforms) (Stretch goal)
• Chapter 17 – PyPDF2 / pdfrw
• Chapter 18 – Converting Markup to PDF (rst2pdf, html2pdf, etc) (Stretch goal)
• Chapter 19 – pyfpdf, An Alternative to ReportLab

Note that the chapter titles are subject to change. Also note that I have marked some of the chapters as “stretch goal” chapters. They may or may not get added depending on whether or not we reach our stretch goal.

Stretch Goal(s)

My stretch goal is to hit $6000 or 500 backers. If we hit either of those, than all of the chapters above will get added. If we don’t, then I will evaluate how close we got and I may put out a survey to see which two chapters we will keep and which two will be voted out of the book.

The last thing I would like to make note of is that the first 3 chapters of the book is over 60 pages of content all by themselves, so even if I only did the first section of the book (i.e. 11 or 12 chapters), the book would still be over 200 pages in length.

If you’d like to get early access to the book, then please go check out the Kickstarter!