Re: [PyX-user] SVG?

[Greg N. <no...@di...>]

Andre Wobst writes:
 > As Greg wanted to use some vector graphics programs to build up the
 > full poster, its fairly straight forward to think about using PyX for
 > that too, isn't it?

Creating the entire poster in PyX is certainly an interesting idea
that I hadn't thought about and I thank you for pointing it out.
However, the above sentence makes me think that perhaps I wasn't clear
about what programs I was thinking of using...  :-)  Specifically I
was looking at these (I was blown away by them, and the fact that
they're both GPL'd):

http://inkscape.org/
http://www.scribus.org.uk/

I very much like making plots in a scripting language (as opposed to
GUI based tools I've seen for the purpose) because I'm constantly
changing small things and redrawing the plot.  However, posters are
different--I only make one or two per year and everything depends on
the visual layout.  It's not like a plot where I don't care about the
details as long as it's accurate and reasonable.  I've spent a lot of
time with various Latex poster styles playing the game where you type
up the Latex file, look at it, see some detail that doesn't look
right, dig through some book to try to figure out what's going on and
how to fix it, and then repeat the process.  I'd really like to just
grab things, drag them around, and put them where I want.

So, in spite of the fact that the above two programs look great, the
problems with importing EPS into them leave me at an impasse.
Ironically, the only program I've found that seems capable of
importing arbitrary EPS without damaging it is that old war horse,
Xfig.

I may regret asking this, but what's your estimate of the level of
difficulty associated with getting PyX to spit out SVG, for someone
with, ahem, no specific knowledge of the two formats (ie, me)?  Is it
a matter of figuring out how to get some finite number of PyX
primitives to know how to write themselves as SVG?  Or is it more
complicated?

Cheers,
Greg