Generate report containing pdf or ps figures?

[Ken Starks]

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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!

 

[Grant Edwards]

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). [...]
Is there a PDF generation library that can place EPS or PDF
figures on a page?

I finally gave up trying to generate a PDF report. I did come
up with two alternative solutions that partly work.

1) XHTML+SVG

Unfortunately a lot of SVG renderers are rather broken.
Opera and Firefox both seem to have rather nasty font
sizing issues.

2) PyRTF+EMF

Seems to work pretty well. However, some Unix apps that
support RTF don't include EMF graphics support (Ted and
Abiword appear to fall into that group). Still, it does
work with OOo, MS Word, and with both versions of the
gratis MS Word viewer.