Overview
We present template_newspaper, a pure-Python engine that renders a complete
twelve-page, large-format newspaper to a print-ready PDF from structured YAML
content. The exemplar edition is The Triplicate, a homage to the historic
newspaper of Crescent City, California (founded 1879). The engine demonstrates
designed multi-column page layout — nameplate and ears, spanning headlines,
flowing column frames with an optional rail, drop caps, pull quotes, ruled
modular boxes, data tables, halftone "engraving" figures and running folios —
while keeping a strict separation between content (data) and engine (code):
a new title is a data edit, never a code change. The layout strategy is a hybrid
in which fixed furniture is drawn directly on the canvas to establish where
the column grid begins, after which body copy flows through ReportLab frames
that split paragraphs across columns automatically. The project obeys the
research-template monorepo contract and is discovered and executed by the same
orchestration pipeline as its code- and prose-focused siblings.
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Associated artifacts
GitHub release: v1.0.2 (https://github.com/docxology/template_newspaper/releases/tag/v1.0.2)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20533675
Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/20533675
PDF SHA-256: 6c693dbd80a4234d30d99f6a890191ff47faf197a0636753fa9785588c550a77
Overview source: Curated paper metadata.
Methods and contributions
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Findings and contributions
- The engine keeps content and code strictly separate, so producing a new newspaper title is a data edit rather than a code change.
- Drawing furniture first and starting column frames below it lets spanning headlines, standing boxes and automatic text flow coexist on one page.
- Rendering is deterministic: the same edition manifest always yields a byte-identical paper.
- The bold weight in a .ttc font collection sits at a face-specific subfont index; an early render produced italic Didot headlines from assuming the wrong index.
- The test suite reports roughly ninety-five percent line coverage.
Methods
- Pure-Python engine rendering YAML content to a print-ready PDF — template_newspaper reads a masthead manifest and per-page YAML files and renders a twelve-page large-format newspaper to PDF.
- Hybrid drawn-furniture / ReportLab-flowed-body layout strategy — Fixed furniture is drawn on the canvas first, then body copy flows through ReportLab frames via Frame.addFromList, splitting paragraphs across columns.
- Nine single-responsibility modules with a deterministic four-step pipeline — Editions are produced by Load, Measure, Compose and Emit steps across modules such as geometry, content, typography, figures, layout and engine.
- Procedural Pillow halftone scenes and monochrome Matplotlib charts — Photographic elements are procedural grayscale Pillow scenes with a 45-degree halftone screen; data graphics are black-and-gray Matplotlib charts.
- pytest end-to-end render tests, mypy type checking, ruff linting — A pytest suite tests the pure logic and renders the edition end-to-end, asserting a valid twelve-page PDF at correct trim with no over-set page.
Summary sources: Paper metadata and evidence · Extracted source text.
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- Friedman_2026_Triplicate_5c991b5c.pdf PDF · 0.05 MiB
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Citation
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Catalog details and resources
Related works
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