dml: add Fillformat.blip_fill()

[jackMort]

HI, is there anyway to add table cell background picture?

[scanny]

There is no API support for this yet, but I believe the PowerPoint format supports it. It would probably be described as a "bitmap fill". I'll make this a feature request for it.

[scanny]

_Cell.fill provides a FillFormat object, allowing cell background to be set to a color, pattern, or gradient. What's missing is the ability of FillFormat to specify an image as a fill (so-called "blip-fill". Renaming this to reflect and changing label to DrawingML.

[mjrosenb]

@scanny I also needed this feature, so I implemented it... by monkey-patching pptx after it is loaded. I'd like to get this added as a feature. Do you have any recommendations w.r.t. code structure before I create a PR?

[scanny]

Well Martin, I would have to discourage you from taking time to create a PR. It's almost impossible to get one close enough that it would take me less time to do that than for me to implement it myself, so they mostly just languish in the queue.

We maintain high standards because I don't want to spend my weekends fixing other people's bugs. Unfortunately that rules out most contributions.

The big barrier for most folks seems to be the analysis documentation (required before any other commit, think of it as an "enhancement proposal"), the acceptance tests, and the unit tests. So basically everything except the code itself. I suppose there's also the code mostly being inconsistent with the style of the rest of the package too, but without the analysis and tests the code is a non-starter anyway.

So if you want to contribute, the place to start is with the analysis document, which would be in this neighborhood: https://python-pptx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/dev/analysis/dml-fill.html. The source for these pages is under the docs/ subdirectory and generally a new feature starts with a new page, although maybe not in this case.

If you want to give that a crack, that's a separately committable item. You'll have to base the formatting, content off of examples that are already there as there's no hard format documented.

[swarner2]

Any update on this? We need this feature and had to implement a not so nice workaround.