Svg to PDF on a Shared Linux Server

SVG to PDF on a shared linux server

I stumbled across TCPDF today which would have been perfect for this, had I known about it at the time. It's just a collection of pure PHP classes, no external dependencies for most things.

It can build PDF's from scratch and you can include pretty much anything you want in there, including SVG (amongst many, many other things), as shown in these examples:

http://www.tcpdf.org/examples.php

Main project page is here:

http://www.tcpdf.org/

Sourceforge page is here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/tcpdf/

batik: svg to pdf on linux (no X server)

Solved by following the recipe here:

http://batik.2283329.n4.nabble.com/Placing-SVG-Text-into-PDF-td3778127.html

major steps:

1. compile fop with ant all
2. copy fop-transcoder-allinone.jar under name pdf-transcoder.jar into the classpath
3. copy xmlgraphics-commons-1.4.jar from fop's lib directory into the classpath

How can I programatically convert SVG files containing text to PDF files (specifically on CentOS 5.3 x86_64)?

You could try princexml, it's free for non-commercial use.

Convert SVG to PDF

Thanks to Adrian for showing how the Batik rasterizer API is supposed to be used. However, I needed a more lightweight solution--- I can't write to temporary files, and I want fewer dependencies. So, starting from the methods he pointed to, I found a way to access the lower-level code to do the conversion and nothing else.

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;

import org.apache.batik.transcoder.Transcoder;
import org.apache.batik.transcoder.TranscoderException;
import org.apache.batik.transcoder.TranscoderInput;
import org.apache.batik.transcoder.TranscoderOutput;
import org.apache.fop.svg.PDFTranscoder;

public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] argv) throws TranscoderException, FileNotFoundException {
        Transcoder transcoder = new PDFTranscoder();
        TranscoderInput transcoderInput = new TranscoderInput(new FileInputStream(new File("/tmp/test.svg")));
        TranscoderOutput transcoderOutput = new TranscoderOutput(new FileOutputStream(new File("/tmp/test.pdf")));
        transcoder.transcode(transcoderInput, transcoderOutput);
    }
}

The compile-and-run commands are

javac -cp batik-rasterizer.jar -d build Test.java
java -cp build:batik-rasterizer.jar Test

The important point is that TranscoderInput and TranscoderOutput can work with any InputStream and OutputStream, not just file streams. Note that one of the constructors takes a org.w3c.dom.Document, which means that you don't even need to serialize an SVG DOM into an SVG string, saving an additional step.

This version also doesn't write anything to stdout/stderr, unlike the high-level API.

For JPEG, PNG, or TIFF output, replace org.apache.fop.svg.PDFTranscoder with org.apache.batik.transcoder.image.JPEGTranscoder, PNGTranscoder, or TIFFTranscoder (note that these raster formats are in a different package).

(I'm not quite sure how Java finds the org.apache.batk.transcoder.* and org.apache.fop.svg.PDFTranscoder classes, since I don't see them in the batik-rasterizer.jar.)

Edit:

Although the simple commandline-compilation works with the batik-rasterizer.jar only, it's doing some sort of classloader magic to find all the necessary classes. In a more realistic case (building a project with Ant), you have to find the classes by hand. They can be found in batik-1.7.zip from the Batik project and fop-1.1.zip from the FOP project. From Batik, you need to compile with batik-transcoder.jar and run with

• batik-transcoder.jar
• batik-anim.jar
• batik-awt-util.jar
• batik-bridge.jar
• batik-css.jar
• batik-dom.jar
• batik-ext.jar
• batik-gvt.jar
• batik-parser.jar
• batik-script.jar
• batik-svg-dom.jar
• batik-util.jar
• batik-xml.jar
• xml-apis-ext.jar

From FOP, you need to compile with fop.jar and run with

• fop.jar
• avalon-framework-4.2.0.jar
• xmlgraphics-commons-1.5.jar

Export SVG elements to PDF?

I do not know of any strong PDF libraries on the client side.

A quick possible way would be to send the svg content to a server, and use something like batik for java to turn the svg to pdf and then send the response to the client again.

Here is a related SO for the converstion.

Generating PDFs from SVG input

Have you considered svglib?

It looks quite promising, especially as reportlab is the featured pdf tool in Django's docs.

from svglib.svglib import svg2rlg
from reportlab.graphics import renderPDF

drawing = svg2rlg("file.svg")
renderPDF.drawToFile(drawing, "file.pdf")

---

Related Topics