Using reportlab to build PDF with vector-based graphs generated by matplotlib

15
votes

I'm trying to build PDF-documents on the server-side in a Django-Installation using reportlab. These documents should contain several graphs which are to be created with matplotlib.

I already figured out how to make reportlab use matplotlib's images without dumping them to the filesystem temporarily by passing PIL-Image objects directly to the Image()-flowable. This works surprisingly well for rasterized images formats like PNG.

Now, the icing on the cake would be able to embed vector based graphics (like SVG).

I used svglib to convert SVGs generated by matplotlib to reportlab graphic objects but unfortunately svglib does omit the tickmarks and axis labels. On some graphs it fails in general.

Do you have any ideas?

2
svgmatplotlibreportlab
In my experience matplotlib is kind of buggy. It's likely because they are doing something weird. You might try filing a bug report with them. - G Gordon Worley III

2 Answers

2
votes

You can generate matplotlib graphics as pdf and use pdfrw to embed it in reportlab canvas as described in this answer