[reportlab-users] Visual Editor

[Bernhard Herzog]

Andy Robinson <andy at reportlab.com> writes:

>> I agree this would be a valuable tool.
>> In at least one case, I designed a complicated logo in a graphics
>> package like Illustrator, saved it to an Encapsulated PostScript file
>> (EPS), and used an editor to convert the EPS output to Reportlab
>> calls.  EPS is easy to reverse-engineer; you can turn each of the
>> one-character drawing commands into function calls.  Inkscape could
>> also be used for that.
> I'm sure that Sketch could be modified trivially to help with this
> (or, the non-GUI portion of sketch reused as a utility); it has
> the EPS-reading code

To be precise here: EPS files in general can contain arbitrary
postscript code.  To parse that you need a full postscript interpreter.
Skencil doesn't have one but you could use e.g. pstoedit [1] to convert
an arbitrary postscript file into Skencil's native format.  pstoedit
uses ghostscript as the parser.

What Skencil does have is an import filter for Illustrator files as
generated by Illustrator <= 8.  That format is based on EPS and
relatively easy to parse.  It's very similar to a PDF page description.
The import filter is a bit incomplete, but most important things are
supported.

> and can write out the PDF operators as part
> of the Piddle back end, which was what I wrote before ReportLab.

Actually, Skencil uses reportlab for PDF export.  It doesn't have a
piddle backend.

   Bernhard

[1] http://www.pstoedit.net/pstoedit

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