I’ve been working on a new makefile for my latex projects. The goal is to have single-source builds of dvi, pdf, and xhtml documents. I ran into a problem of generating figures. latex expects eps graphics, pdflatex expects pdf figures, and latexml expects png figures (or will try to generate them). In order to generate documents with make, I need a way to generate eps and pdf figures from svg sources (I usually use inkscape to make my figures). Inkscape can be run from the command line, but I dont want to install inkscape on my server because that will require installing a ton of libraries that don’t make sense to have on a server with no graphical interface.

As it turns out, writing such a command line tool is very easy with librsvg and cairo. Carl Worth of redhat has produced a nice demo of svg2pdf which can be found at freedesktop.org. I cloned his project, create a cmake project out of it, and made a trivial modification to turn it into svg2eps as well.

You can find my code at git://git.cheshirekow.com/svg2x.git and there’s some doxygen documentation Doxygen documentation.