[pdftex] PdfTeX and SVG graphics

[George N. White III]

On Fri, 12 Nov 2004, Ben Crowell wrote:

> I've spent some time trying various methods of converting SVG to PDF,
> and so far the results are pretty discouraging.

Yes, but your experiments are very helpful.  The next question is whether 
any of these have the foundations (good underlying design, sufficiently 
motivated and supported development team) to solve the problems.

The only way I know to find out is to dig in and starting fixing things 
that are broken.  I'd start by trying to determine the underlying graphics 
model and the level of machinery to deal with things like fonts and raster 
images.  Some conversion tools define a common intermediate format so you 
need to watch out for limitations there (e.g. the problems trying to add 
CMYK to Gimp, which seems too closely tied to X11's graphics model).

I'm very impressed with the ability of OpenOffice.org to write PDF,
but my point of comparison is Acrobat which suffers from problems
in PS code from Win32 apps.

http://graphics.openoffice.org/svg/svg.htm has an alpha-level export to 
SVG filter, but when I tried to build a very early OOo on my system I ran 
into conflicts with the versions of development tools for our "mission 
critical" software -- maybe it is easier now.  In any case, a working
export to SVG filter should be helpful implementing an import capability
(it is always nice to be able to export what you have imported to see
the differences).

--
George N. White III  <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
   Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada