Generating synthetic report PDFs with ReportLab often stumbles on a few recurring pain points for data‑science teams: missing prerequisite variables, unclear file‑path handling, and preview failures when optional libraries aren’t installed. The following practical checklist resolves these issues and lets you run the script end‑to‑end with minimal friction.
First, ensure the data source is defined. The loop expects a list named DOCS where each entry is a dictionary containing the keys referenced in render_pdf (title, method, task, primary_benchmark, test_acc, metric_name, prior_best, beats_sota, authors, params_m, datasets, optimizer, lr, batch, epochs, baseline_name, baseline_val, baseline_test, val_acc, limitations, funding_note). If you only have a CSV or JSON file, load it into DOCS before the loop, for example:
import json
with open(“samples.json”) as f:
DOCS = json.load(f)
Second, handle the ground_truth function and SHOW_FIRST_PAGE flag. Define a stub if you do not need actual evaluation:
def ground_truth(doc):
return {“dummy”: True}
SHOW_FIRST_PAGE = False # set True only when you want the preview
Third, guard the optional preview block with a try/except and install the needed packages only when you intend to use them:
pip install reportlab pypdfium2 matplotlib
Fourth, make file paths robust across environments. Instead of hardcoding “/content”, use os.path.join with a base directory you create:
base_dir = os.getcwd()
os.makedirs(base_dir, exist_ok=True)
path = os.path.join(base_dir, f”report_{i}.pdf”)
Finally, if you encounter empty pages or missing page breaks, verify that PageBreak() is appended after the elements that belong to the current page; the script already places them correctly after the abstract and after the methods section.
By defining DOCS, providing a simple ground_truth stub, setting SHOW_FIRST_PAGE appropriately, installing ReportLab (and preview tools only when needed), and using os‑safe paths, the PDF generation runs smoothly, producing a three‑page report with the headline metric cleanly separated from the results table.
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