So, I failed to re­lease uqbar this week. How­ev­er, I am re­leas­ing rst2pdf 0.8, with SVG sup­port! Get its vec­to­ri­al good­ness from http://rst2pdf.­google­code.­com

I just com­mit­ted in­to trunk of rst2pdf a nice­ly work­ing SVGIm­age flow­able for re­port­lab­s.

The code is self­-­con­tained in two files:

• svgim­age.py

• uni­­con­vsaver.py

You can use them in your app if you want (I'd like to know, though). One of them is GPL/L­GPL (it's ba­si­cal­ly copied from uni­con­ver­tor) the oth­er is MIT-Li­censed.

The out­put is as­ton­ish­ing: svg.pdf is on­ly 32KB and com­plete­ly res­o­lu­tion-in­de­pen­den­t. Graph­ics in your PDF That look good print­ed and on screen! And are not huge! Yay!

This will be the flag­ship new fea­ture in to­mor­row's rst2pdf 0.8.

One of the big lim­i­ta­tions of re­port­lab is that it has no sup­port for vec­tor-based im­ages. You can't in­sert SVG, EPS or any oth­er vec­tor-based for­mat in your doc­u­ments.

Un­til now.

By hi­jack­ing an­oth­er app called uni­con­ver­tor, I have man­aged to in­sert as vec­tors SVG im­ages in a re­port­lab doc­u­men­t.

Here's the hack­ish code:

import sys,os
from app.io import load
from app.plugins import plugins
import app
from reportlab.platypus import *
from reportlab.lib.styles import getSampleStyleSheet
from reportlab.lib.units import inch

app.init_lib()
plugins.load_plugin_configuration()


class SVGImage(Flowable):
  def __init__(self,imgname):
    self.doc = load.load_drawing(imgname)
    for k in dir(self.doc):
      print k
    self.saver = plugins.find_export_plugin(plugins.guess_export_plugin(".pdf"))
    Flowable.__init__(self)

  def wrap(self,aW,aH):
    br=self.doc.BoundingRect()
    return br[2],br[3]

  def drawOn(self,canv,x,y,_sW=0):
    canv.translate(x,y)
    self.saver (self.doc,".ignoreme.pdf",options={'pdfgen_canvas':canv})
    os.unlink(".ignoreme.pdf")

styles = getSampleStyleSheet()
def go():
    doc = SimpleDocTemplate("phello.pdf")
    Story = [Spacer(1,2*inch)]
    style = styles["Normal"]
    p = SVGImage('warning.svg')
    Story.append(p)
    doc.build(Story)

go()

It has sev­er­al prob­lems (see where the sec­ond para­graph end­ed), but it does work.

To run it, you need a warn­ing.svg file (ed­it as need­ed) and you run it this way (re­plac­ing the path as prop­er for your se­tup):

PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/uniconvertor/ python use_uniconv.py

In fac­t, this is not lim­it­ed to SVG files. You should be able to use the fol­low­ing for­mat­s:

• Corel­­DRAW ver.7-X3,X4 (C­­DR/CDT/C­CX/C­­DRX/CMX)

• Adobe Il­lus­­tra­­tor up to 9 ver. (AI post­script based)

• Post­script (P­S)

• En­­cap­­su­lat­ed Post­script (EP­S)

• Com­put­er Graph­ics Metafile (CG­M)

• Win­­dows Metafile (WM­F)

• XFIG

• Scal­able Vec­­tor Graph­ics (SVG)

• Sken­­cil/S­ketch/sK1 (SK and SK1)

• Acorn Draw (AF­F)

I had one too many prob­lems with kmail from KDE4 in my eee with Kubun­tu, and sylpheed-­claws is just un­us­able in a small screen (the huge wid­get­s! the non-hid­able things all over the in­ter­face!) I de­cid­ed to get old fash­ioned and try a con­sole mail read­er.

I was a pine us­er for many years, and a mutt us­er for a while, and I was deeply dis­ap­point­ed that the last three years have been bad for these pro­gram­s.

Just be­cause you run in a ter­mi­nal, there's no rea­son to be hard to con­fig­ure! Af­ter spend­ing 20 min­utes try­ing to get a de­cent IMAP ac­count set­up (just two IMAP ac­counts) in alpine and an­oth­er 10 won­der­ing if mutt re­al­ly had no place in the UI for ac­count con­fig­u­ra­tion (and whether the De­bian/KUbun­tu de­fault "com­ment­ed" con­fig file is the prod­uct of hard drugs), I tried Cone.

It was blis­s. It was all I re­mem­bered from pine years ago (on lo­cal ac­counts) on­ly over IMAP.

Easy to con­fig­ure, easy to use, quick, ca­pa­ble. I was in love all over again.

While I will keep us­ing KMail on my main note­book un­der Arch Lin­ux where I had no re­li­a­bil­i­ty prob­lems what­so­ev­er, I have Cone con­fig­ured in my server's shell ac­count and in the eee.

On my on­go­ing some­thing-re­leased-ev­ery-fri­day ram­page, this fri­day I will re­lease a work­ing ver­sion of Uqbar, a Guten­berg project e-­texts in­ter­face.

It may use use pan­doc and rst2pdf and makeztxt and oth­er things to make e-­books that are pret­ty to read, and work on my Sony Clie. We'll see.

This project has been "sleep­ing" since 2005, I think I can now, with my new fo­cus in lim­it­ed, quick de­vel­op­men­t, get a rea­son­able ver­sion ready in two week­s.

I may slip a lit­tle rst2pdf up­date, too.

Af­ter that, back to Urssus.