Export to SVG

[r3n4ud]

A great feature will be to implement an "export to svg" or "svgreport" feature for diagrams. I'll be happy to help on this (done some svg-related work in the past). I can parse the code but some core team member could help on this to evaluate the feasibility and give some details on the actual diagrams production process.

This feature will be really usefull for non-connected / documentation usage, e.g. pdf document production (html to pdf conversion doesn't seem to be a good solution for me and svg to pdf conversion works relatively well if you know what you are doing). svg export seems the best option for vector-maniacs like me since we could post-edit the svg for document inclusion at an intermediate step of the whole document production process.

[scrapper]

TJ already uses SVG for some report elements. But most of the reports are still HTML to make use of the rendering capabilities of the browser. If you want to have all the reports available in pure SVG you would have to add the table and text rendering to TJ. That's A LOT of work. Since some programs like LibreOffice can embed HTML pages, this may not be worth the effort.

[r3n4ud]

I have browsed the code and figured out that indeed SVG is already used for some reports. I agree there is a fair amount of work to be done to implement a new backend like SVG (could be TikZ/pgf or Metapost) but you can't compare LibreOffice-like apps to LaTeX / ConTeXt...

[r3n4ud]

How about a "backend-as-a-plugin" approach to the issue? Divide and conquer may prove successfull in the long run.

[r3n4ud]

I'm curious: why implement XMLElement and XMLDocument and not use nokogiri for example?

[scrapper]

nokogiri is quite a heavy dependency. It may have caused pain on Windows and MacOS. I only need a small fraction of it and I did not like the API too much.

The plug-in would need to have full access to the internal data model to be flexible enough. I don't want to expose those APIs. For out of tree report generators, reading an output format and then converting it into the desired format is probably the better approach.

[r3n4ud]

OK, it seems to me that a new output format is needed for out-of-tree processing. Am I right?
Maybe we should discuss this on the mailing list...

[scrapper]

There was some discussion regarding JSON output. I'm not sure that anybody is working on it though.

[r3n4ud]

Where to?

[jwhendy]

For what it's worth, I recently printed to PDF and used pdf2svg to successfully convert it. Works great in a browser, though the file size was a bit large (1.2MB), so I found the page load a bit slow when I uploaded it to an IBM Connections wiki at work. Definitely a workaround, but wanted to mention it if anyone following this needed this immediately.

[r3n4ud]

@jwhendy Thanks for sharing this. The best I have achieved is to hack the html report (sed is your friend) and apply a wkhtmltopdf conversion to get a decent PDF for direct inclusion in a ConTeXt document…
Not optimal but best than nothing…

[matthiasbeyer]

I'd like to see SVG export as well, because embedding a HTML page into my thesis work (latex) is simply not possible. 😄 Having an SVG would be a great idea!