I recently had the need to convert a local path to a UNC path for an application I was writing. The application monitors a local folder for files and serves them to a client over the network as requested, but for the client to be able to access the file the path had to be a UNC path.

There didn’t seem to be a built in way to do this in Python so here’s what I ended up with.

PyPDF2 (forked from pyPdf) is wonderful. I use it a fair bit in my job, mainly for chopping up PDFs and re-assembling the pages in a different order. It does sometimes have difficulty with non-standard PDFs though that seem fine in other programs. This can be frustrating.

The one that I’ve been battling with today from some PDFs provided by a client was:

PyPDF2.utils.PdfReadError: EOF marker not found

I managed to find a workaround using PDFtk to fix the PDF in memory at the first sign of any trouble. It works well so far, so in case anyone else is having similar issues I thought I’d write it up.

In a document management program that I’m writing I’m displaying images in a QGraphicsView. The QGraphicsView supports a drag mode that allows a user to simply click and drag within the view to pan around, which works great when a large image is displayed and the user has zoomed in quite far.

Panning the image this way does mean that the user has to click back on the image and move the mouse again when the mouse reaches the end of the screen. I needed a way to implement mouse wrapping so that when the mouse reaches the end of the QGraphicsView during panning and the user is still holding down the left mouse button the mouse will jump to the opposite edge, giving a smooth continuous pan.

Here’s what I came up with…

Most databases store dates in the format YYYY-MM-DD. When using a QTableView to display a database table in PyQt it’s useful to be able to display this in a different format. Being from the UK I’d rather have the date displayed in the UK style – DD/MM/YYYY. This is where QStyledItemDelegate comes in.

I’d put off looking into this for a while because whenever I tried to look in to using QStyledItemDelegate I saw people mentioning paint methods. I know nothing about painting in PyQt and get quite scared when I see it mentioned. I really need to get over that.

Not to worry though, because it’s not needed…

Poppler is a PDF rendering library based on the xpdf-3.0 code base. It has bindings for Qt4 which we can use through Python/PyQt. Using these libraries under most popular Linux distributions is as simple as installing the Poppler package, but under Windows I’ve found that things are a little more tricky to get working.