I want to create a drawing application where I can place text and images on a canvas. Those elements also need to be interactively manipulated. Eventually the resulting canvas has to be exported to a vector based PDF. An excellent contender for this functionality would be SVG.
However, this application also needs to be crossbrowser compatible. I’ve been browsing around for some time now and have seen a couple of solutions available. I found among others RaphaelJS and Google’s SVGWeb for working with SVG.
Now for converting those SVG files to a PDF I’m not sure if for instance Batik will offer me what I am looking for.
Also, how would bitmap images be handled when converting the SVG to PDF?
Images within a PDF have to be part of the PDF. They can use any number of compression techniques (jpeg, fax, jbig2, zip, gif, a couple others), various bits per color, various colors per pixel, and so forth… but the pixels must be defined within that PDF.
I’ve used Batik myself. A little clunky in combination with iText (surprisingly large amount of code involved), but quite serviceable. The only thing that really bugged me was that it wouldn’t draw text as text… Batik insists on drawing it as paths. They may have overcome this since I started using it a year or two ago. But that was kind of a deal breaker (HUGE pdf bloat) so we ended up rendering our text separately: PITA, potential z-order issues (that never came up for us), plus a couple subtle interal layout issues that didn’t turn up till later.
Batik supports script, animation, and a variety of Other Things that don’t really matter within the bounds of SVG->PDF conversion. There’s at least one other Java SVG library out there that is much more compact(not as feature rich… half empty/half full), though I can’t for the life of me remember the name at the moment. The name came up on the iText mailing list maybe a year ago? Don’t recall exactly. Quite some time ago, and AFTER I got Batik working. Ah well.