[Qgis-developer] Improving QGIS integration in cartographic workfows

[G. Allegri]

Hi Nyall (and all the others).
I don't think SVG is the right way to go. Even if it is a great standard,
It's implementations vary too mich from sw to sw and it doesn't meant for
print productions. It's ok to exchange graphics but not to exhange document
models.

You raised the foundamental problem: the Qt PDF support lacks important
features, first of all CMYK. I don't know what Scribus uses for the output
(it will be interesting do have a look), OpenOrienteering has temporary
circumvented the problems forking and improving the QT PDF Printer [1] to
support CMYK exports.

@Even, I know that GDAL has a better backend for PDF export but I fear that
translating the QGIS rendering outputs (vectorials, texts, images) to a
different library would be a huge effort, don't you think?
And yes, obviously we can slice compositions in multiple objects and export
single PDF layers but it's very far from a production workflow! :)

I hope to see this topic grow, because I feel it's critical to QGIS
adoption and quality.

Giovanni

[1]
https://github.com/OpenOrienteering/mapper/commit/df73eb75499261dc6978556f960b228bf809e728



2017-02-17 9:32 GMT+01:00 Vincent Schut <schut at satelligence.com>:

> Just chiming in as a qgis-user: the best (imho) open source DTP software
> is build with QT: scribus (https://www.scribus.net/). Afaik it does
> support most things professional publishers need, such as CMYK workflows,
> high quality PDF exports, etc. Might be worth taking a look at, or
> contacting the devs about this, as they seem to have solved most of these
> problems?
>
> Vincent.
>
> On Fri, Feb 17, 2017 at 8:50 AM, Even Rouault <even.rouault at spatialys.com>
> wrote:
>
>> > Unfortunately this is quite involved. At the moment QGIS is highly
>>
>> > tied into Qt's painter and printer framework. It's going to be very
>>
>> > difficult to change this and make a change like using another library
>>
>> > for exports. I think the most feasible approach would be to get the
>>
>> > changes we require implemented upstream in Qt itself. It's likely less
>>
>> > work, and also benefits other Qt projects too.
>>
>>
>>
>> The GDAL PDF writer creates PDF "at hand" and is able to create layered
>> PDFs :
>>
>> http://gdal.org/frmt_pdf.html
>>
>> Currently one raster layer, one "annotation" layer for legend, and
>> several vector layers, mostly due to the API constraints of the GDAL API.
>>
>> I'm not sure how feasible it would be (would require at least renumbering
>> PDF objects and merging drawing instructions), but potentially you could
>> render several layers into separate PDFs and then merge the PDFs into a
>> single layered one
>>
>>
>>
>> Even
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Spatialys - Geospatial professional services
>>
>> http://www.spatialys.com
>>
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