[GRASS-dev] [GRASS GIS] #3033: Cairo and PS drivers display only one raster or vector for SVG and PS

[GRASS GIS]

#3033: Cairo and PS drivers display only one raster or vector for SVG and PS
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  Reporter:  wenzeslaus  |      Owner:  grass-dev@…
      Type:  defect      |     Status:  new
  Priority:  major       |  Milestone:  7.2.0
 Component:  Display     |    Version:  svn-trunk
Resolution:              |   Keywords:  d.mon, cairo, ps, SVG, vector
       CPU:              |  graphics
  Unspecified            |   Platform:  Unspecified
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Comment (by glynn):

 Replying to [comment:2 wenzeslaus]:

 > This is serious limitation. Is there a way to change the rendering to
 not have this problem.

 Write SVG to a temporary file, read and parse the original file and
 temporary file, merge SVG documents, write XML.

 Merging the documents isn't exactly trivial, e.g. you need to rename
 elements in <defs> sections (and any references to them) to avoid name
 collisions. This might be feasible if we can figure out some bounds on
 what we can expect cairo to generate, but it's still a fair amount of work
 and seems fragile (e.g. future versions of cairo may change the document
 structure).

 > Combining manually in Inkscape was not possible; I was not able to align
 the layers.

 Inkscape is garbage for anything with technical constraints. I usually end
 up writing Python scripts to manipulate the XML.

 > But it seems that PS driver is not as powerful as Cairo and same things
 are lost during the subsequent conversions, page size was wrong as well.

 Converting !PostScript invariably loses information. Being a programming
 language rather than a data format means that you can't extract high-
 levels structure, you just have to execute it and capture the rendering
 primitives.

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/ticket/3033#comment:3>
GRASS GIS <https://grass.osgeo.org>