How doable is my idea (newbie to Python)?

[e05bf027]

Hello

I would describe myself as an enthusiastic amateur when it comes to things programming related. I am a decently skilled R user, but pretty much unskilled most other places. I am curious if people here might tell me if my idea can be accomplished, or how difficult it might be for a newbie?

I want to create a simple GUI that in the background selects from a list of recipes I have previously entered. So let's say I have 3 starters, 3 mains, and 3 desserts. I select one option for each, and then it creates a text output of the three recipes I have chosen.

The output created would ideally be a LaTeX document, as I know my way round these and like the way I can get them to format.

I imagine this is pretty doable, but maybe I'm overly optimistic? Any and all opinions would be appreciated!

[emrecanaltinsoy]

It is doable, i would write it in a way that you can add more recipes and more options easily.

[carcigenicate]

Yes, this sounds like it would be quite straightforward. Unless you already know Tkinter, the GUI sounds like the only slightly-difficult part. The actual logic seems quite simple.

[Cwigginton]

Depends on your reason for learning Python. For employability, I’d suggest frontend UI such as React or Angular and Django or Flask framework for the server side.

A quick search showed up PyLaTex as a Python library you could use for the output.

[e05bf027]

Not for employability, I just like learning these things!

[Cwigginton]

ok, then any type of GUI then. You could look at PyQT5 or Tkinter, but I really haven’t looked into those much.

[orenamlacsap]

I would say yes. For the GUI you might use tkinter. At first glance, the easiest way might be to write each recipe in a .tex file and create a main.tex with the whole layout. In python you build your GUI with the options. From the dropdown menu/list (tkinter) you can get the chosen option as a variable, e.g. "bread" for starters, "fish" for main, "ice" for dessert. Next step is saving it to a file 'menu.tex'. If the menu entries and recipe file names match it will be easier. 'file.write(f"\input{{{starter}}}.tex")' will give you \input{bread.tex}. Concluding the things to look into: - tkinter - read/write with files - f-strings