Py-preppy

ReportLab’s templating system

Preppy is ReportLab’s templating system. It was developed in late 2000 and has been in continual production use since then. It is open source BSD-license.

The key features are

• small. Preppy is a single Python module. If you want a templating system ‘in the box’, it’s easy to include it in your project
• easy to learn. It takes about one minute to scan all the features
• just Python. We have not invented another language, and if you want to do something - includes, quoting, filters - you just use Python
• compiled to bytecode a .prep file gets compiled to a Python function in a .pyc file
• easy to debug preppy generates proper Python exceptions, with the correct line numbers for the .prep file. You can follow tracebacks from Python script to Preppy template and back, through multiple includes
• easy to type and read. We’ve been using this syntax since well before Django was thought of
• 8-bit safe it makes no assumption that you are generating markup and does nothing unexpected with whitespace; you could use it to generate images or binary files if you wanted to.