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PonyExpress-DOC

Create your own PDF

In ordre to create your own PDF, you will need :

  • to create a Typst template that will create a PDF with the desired layout
  • configure a python script that will import the Grist data and export them as PDF

Pony express will

  • import your data from grist
  • create a typst file that will import and setup your template
  • compile this file to a pdf and delete the intermediary file

Typst

Typst is an user friendly Latex alternative. You can find the documentation here and experiment with it in their online app

Create a folder in templates for your own projet.

You can use ./templates/exemple/birthday_template.typ or the others files in the templates folder as reference.

Being a template, it can’t be compiled itself. You need another file that will import it and give it its required parameters (those are the files that will be created automatically by pony_express)

For now, you can create your own to test your template independently from pony_express. ./template/exemple/test_birthday.typ is an exemple of such a file

To test it :

  • you can compile it typst compile templates/exemple/test_birthday.typ
  • you can import both the test_birthday and the birthday_template in the typst webapp to experiment with it online
  • you can use the tinymist extension for VSCodium to have a direct preview locally
    • troubleshooting : the extension does not give you the error message. is there is no working preview, compile your file manually to display the compilation error messages

Fonts

You can add any font in your template folder. It will be scanned and added by PonyExpress when compiling.

Python

Once you have a typst template, you can now duplicate the src/exemple.py file.

Use the included commentaries to configure the variables and functions according to your needs. For exemple :

  • which line to ignore (should_be_exported()),
  • how to name the pdf (name_pdf()),
  • how to transform the imported data (apply_data_transformation())

You can now run it by calling

Terminal window
task serve_exemple
Terminal window
poetry run python src/pony_express/exemple.py

The generated pdf will appear generated