Generate report containing pdf or ps figures?

[Ken Starks]

Cameron Laird wrote:
> In article <132pnp6r4qg0lc2 at corp.supernews.com>,
> Grant Edwards  <grante at visi.com> wrote:
>> I need to be able to generate a PDF report which consists
>> mostly of vector images (which I can generate as encapsulated
>> Postscript, PDF, or SVG).  What I need is a way to combine
>> these figures into a single PDF document.  Right now the
>> reports consist entire of these figures, so I just write the
>> figures out to temp files and then use os.system() to run
>> ghostscript with appropriate options to combine them into a
>> single PDF file.
>>
>> I'd like to be able to add some text and/or place the figures
>> in a manner other than one per page in the output document.
>>
>> I've looked at ReportLab's documentation, but although it
>> appears to be able to use bitmap images (e.g jpeg) it doesn't
>> appear to be able to use vector images (EPS/PDF/SVG).
>>
>> Is there a PDF generation library that can place EPS or
>> PDF figures on a page?
> 			.
> 			.
> 			.
> You're stuck.
> 
<snip>

I have also done quite a bit of work in this area, and keep coming back
to LaTeX (pdfLaTeX). For automatic document production--if you have
a good quantity of very similar documents--you can produce the LaTeX
from XML, hence many other input formats.

The graphics need to be converted into pdf format, and you need to be
careful that the vector nature of the file is preserved during this
conversion, as well as transparency. Unfortunately this is still
uncommon for SVG. Also Adobe seem to have lost their one-time enthusiasm
for SVG, since they acquired Flash and Friends.

A rather new entry into the arena is 'Altsoft Xml2PDF Workstation' which
is free for command-line use, but not for server use. Seems to produce 
PDF of reasonable quality and to use vector format, transparency and 
gradient fills.

Another possibility is to wrap things up as SMIL. The latest versions of 
Acrobat reader can use them, using RealPlayer (for example) as the 
actual multimedia engine. There is at least one LaTeX package that can
produce PDF that incorporates such multi-media.

I've rather given up on ReportLab. Trying to extend it (the free part) 
to use graduated fills completely did my head in!