[reportlab-users] Amusement : SVG to ReportLab converter

Andy Robinson reportlab-users@reportlab.com
Thu, 26 Sep 2002 08:15:44 +0100


> Good to hear you're having fun with the RL Toolkit! Before looking at
> your module: have you visited the following links?
> 
>    http://www.reportlab.com/extensions.html
>    http://python.net/~gherman/#svglib
> 
My first impression is that both have a place.
If you see some nice graphic you can get in SVG,
and it can be converted into pdfgen commands, it's easy
to include it in a script somewhere.  Think of this
as a 'design time' tool to get logos and so on into
a form that's very easy to use with simple scripts
at runtime.

Idea:  we put something in renderPDF so that instead of
making a PDF from any reportlab/graphics drawing, it 
could optionally generate pdfgen source code. Or, even 
better, a "literal object" with raw PDF operators.  
Imagine you have a web invoice script which needs
a fancy logo derivable from an SVG drawing, but the curves
and polygons in this make it 10x more complex than the rest
of the page put together.  This approach would be generic
and very fast.  

I'm excited now, one for the weekend...

- Andy