Develop Reference

Flipped output using svgwrite-1.1.9

Building svg file using svgwrite-1.1.9 using polyline entities.
How can I prevent flipped output?
It seems the coordinates are messed up - vertical (y) is flipped.
Here's the code I'm using to generate the polyline:
# generate svg element
line = dwg.add(dwg.polyline(
pairs,
stroke='black', fill='blue'))
Pairs is a list of tuples in cartesian coordinates (X Y pairs):
[(2228.427, 1643.919), (2419.889, 1643.919), (2419.889, 1814.927), (2431.918, 1985.935), (2216.397, 1985.935), (2228.427, 1814.927), (2228.427, 1643.919)]
I'm using InkScape to visualize the svg output, and an in-house editor to visualize an alternate data stream; the in-house version is the correct version. I'm missing one entity.
The right entity block is rotated (in source), the left one is not (but is flipped). You can see in the svg that the entire right block is also flipped vertically, so it's above where it should be.
I haven't set any user viewport/coordinates in the SVG.
I'm pretty sure XY are the same (SVG, other).

Difference between SVG and data coordinate systems is the correct answer, I can't flag Martineau as correct (not enough rep?), but this lets me post an updated graphic.

How to Invert SVG text with appropriate kerning?

How can I invert (rotate 180 degrees) a text object so that the text is kerned appropriately?
My example uses Python and the svgwrite package, but my question seems about any SVG.
Suppose I use the following code:
dwg = svgwrite.Drawing()
dwg.add(dwg.text(fullName, (int(width/2.),gnameHeight),
font_size=gnameFontSize, text_anchor="middle"))
The above code generates text looking like this:
dwg.text() objects accept a rotate parameter that is applied to all characters in a text string, so I've used the following code to reverse the string first:
pcRotate = [180]
ngap = 1
revFullName = fullName
rcl = []
for c in revFullName:
rcl.append(c)
for i in range(ngap):
rcl.append(' ')
rcl.reverse()
revFullName = ''.join(rcl)
dwg.add(dwg.text(revFullName, (int(width/2.),pcnameHeight),
font_size=gnameFontSize, text_anchor="middle", rotate=pcRotate))
But, this produces the very ugly version below:
and this is using an artificial space gap between characters to make it slightly less unreadable.
What's the best way to tap into whatever kerning is being used by standard text in this inverted situation?

The rotate attribute of a <text> element is intended for situations where you want to rotate individual characters. If you want to rotate the whole text object then you should be using a transform instead.
http://pythonhosted.org/svgwrite/classes/mixins.html#transform-mixin

I'm posting this as a self-answer, only to make formatting more clear. Two useful hints from #paul-lebeau happily acknowledged.
While the svgwrite package seems solid, its documentation is a bit thin. The two things I wish it had said:
The rotate attribute of a <text> element is intended for situations where you want to rotate individual characters. If you want to rotate the whole text object, then you should be using a transform mixin instead.
If you need to center the transformed text with respect to some center (other that the default current user coordinate system), add two additional parameters xctr,yctr. This differs from the doc which calls for a single center argument that is a (2-tuple).
The correct code is:
pcRotate = 'rotate(180,%s,%s)' % (int(width/2.),pcnameHeight)
textGroup = svgwrite.container.Group(transform=pcRotate)
textGroup.add(dwg.text(fullName, (int(width/2.),pcnameHeight),
font_size=gnameFontSize, text_anchor="middle"))
dwg.add(textGroup)

Python, how to insert value in Powerpoint template?

I want to use an existing powerpoint presentation to generate a series of reports:
In my imagination the powerpoint slides will have content in such or similar form:
Date of report: {{report_date}}
Number of Sales: {{no_sales}}
...
Then my python app opens the powerpoint, fills in the values for this report and saves the report with a new name.
I googled, but could not find a solution for this.
There is python-pptx out there, but this is all about creating a new presentation and not inserting values in a template.
Can anybody advice?

Ultimately, barring some other library which has additional functionality, you need some sort of brute force approach to iterate the Slides collection and each Slide's respective Shapes collection in order to identify the matching shape (unless there is some other library which has additional "Find" functionality in PPT). Here is brute force using only win32com:
from win32com import client
find_date = r'{{report_date}}'
find_sales = r'{{no_sales}}'
report_date = '01/01/2016' # Modify as needed
no_sales = '604' # Modify as needed
path = 'c:/path/to/file.pptx'
outpath = 'c:/path/to/output.pptx'
ppt = client.Dispatch("PowerPoint.Application")
pres = ppt.Presentations.Open(path, WithWindow=False)
for sld in pres.Slides:
for shp in sld.Shapes:
with shp.TextFrame.TextRange as tr:
if find_date in tr.Text
tr.Replace(find_date, report_date)
elif find_sales in shp.TextFrame.Characters.Text
tr.Replace(find_sales, no_sales)
pres.SaveAs(outpath)
pres.Close()
ppt.Quit()
If these strings are inside other strings with mixed text formatting, it gets trickier to preserve existing formatting, but it should still be possible.
If the template file is still in design and subject to your control, I would consider giving the shape a unique identifier like a CustomXMLPart or you could assign something to the shapes' AlternativeText property. The latter is easier to work with because it doesn't require well-formed XML, and also because it's able to be seen & manipulated via the native UI, whereas the CustomXMLPart is only accessible programmatically, and even that is kind of counterintuitive. You'll still need to do shape-by-shape iteration, but you can avoid the string comparisons just by checking the relevant property value.

I tried this on a ".ppx" file I had hanging around.
A microsoft office power point ".pptx" file is in ".zip" format.
When I unzipped my file, I got an ".xml" file and three directories.
My ".pptx" file has 116 slides comprised of 3,477 files and 22 directories/subdirectories.
Normally, I would say it is not workable, but since you have only two short changes you probably could figure out what to change and zip the files to make a new ".ppx" file.
A warning: there are some xml blobs of binary data in one or more of the ".xml" files.

You can definitely do what you want with python-pptx, just perhaps not as straightforwardly as you imagine.
You can read the objects in a presentation, including the slides and the shapes on the slides. So if you wanted to change the text of the second shape on the second slide, you could do it like this:
slide = prs.slides[1]
shape = slide.shapes[1]
shape.text = 'foobar'
The only real question is how you find the shape you're interested in. If you can make non-visual changes to the presentation (template), you can determine the shape id or shape name and use that. Or you could fetch the text for each shape and use regular expressions to find your keyword/replacement bits.
It's not without its challenges, and python-pptx doesn't have features specifically designed for this role, but based on the parameters of your question, this is definitely a doable thing.

Insert images to powerpoint slide using python (win32com.client)

I have been tasked with inserting and re-sizing several hundred images to a powerpoint.
I need to use a particular source format that is similar to other power points used by our company.
I have been playing around with activepython's win32com API's and I have figured out how to open up a file and create a blank slide.
My question is how would I go about inserting an image and resizing it to whatever size I need(the images will be the only thing on each page). Also I am trying to use my company's theme for the background and title page but this is not as important as getting the images on page and re-sized.
any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

I got this from the page Xavier referred to:
Pict1 = Slide1.Shapes.AddPicture(FileName=pictName, LinkToFile=False, SaveWithDocument=True, Left=100, Top=100, Width=200, Height=200)
That will work if your original images are square; otherwise, it will distort them.
Better to specify -1 for the width and height. Then PPT will insert them at their "natural" size (whatever PPT might decide that is ... not important for present purposes). Then you can read the shape's size to determine its aspect ratio and make sure that stays constant if you change the size or you can set the shape's .LockAspectRatio property to true and adjust either height or width and the other will auto adjust to maintain the aspect ratio.

You should use Shapes.AddPicture as described here (archived version of this broken link):
from tkinter import *
import tkinter.filedialog as tkFileDialog
import win32com.client # middleman/translator/messanger between windows and python
import win32com.gen_py.MSO as MSO # contains constants refering to Microsoft Office Objects
import win32com.gen_py.MSPPT as MSPPT # contains constants refering to Microsoft Office Power Point Objects
g = globals() # a dictonary of global vlaues, that will be the constants of the two previous imports
for c in dir(MSO.constants): g[c] = getattr(MSO.constants, c) # globally define these
for c in dir(MSPPT.constants): g[c] = getattr(MSPPT.constants, c)
Application = win32com.client.Dispatch("PowerPoint.Application")
Application.Visible = True # shows what's happening, not required, but helpful for now
Presentation = Application.Presentations.Add() # adds a new presentation
Slide1 = Presentation.Slides.Add(1, ppLayoutBlank) # new slide, at beginning
TenptStr = Slide1.Shapes.AddShape(msoShape10pointStar, 100, 100, 200, 200)
pictName = tkFileDialog.askopenfilename(title="Please Select the Image you wish to load")
print(pictName)
Pict1 = Slide1.Shapes.AddPicture(FileName=pictName, LinkToFile=False, SaveWithDocument=True, Left=100, Top=100, Width=200, Height=200)
Note that the "choose file" option produces a file path with '/" rather than '' and you may need to replace the former by the latter.

Firstly I would resize them first before insertion using PIL python imaging library. In general mucking about with any office image processing has been uniformly awful for me so I would not recommend it.
secondly the object model examples in VBA found in PowerPoint help or online are usually all you need to get a long way
from memory the insert was pretty easy -
ppt.slide.ImageFromFile("path")
however exact positioning I do not remember and I am afraid I don't have ppt here to try out. If I get achance later I will post some references
Good luck with the docs

I agree with the accepted answer. I would like to point out that I needed to prefix the FileName string with an 'r' to treat the backslashes as literal characters. Escaping the backslashes by replacing single backslashes with double also works. #vestland this may be helpful

How can I make Sphinx's inheritance_diagram readable?

Similar to this chap's post, I'm seeing Sphinx generate unreadable graphviz output:
How can I generate readable output?
Nothing happens if I add -Gfontsize=140
If I tell it to use neato instead of dot it produces readable output, but the graphs aren't tree-like.

I figured out the answer from this thread. In the graphviz.py code, they have a default value for the size of the graph at 8.0x12.0. If you want to allow Graphviz to determine the size you need to put this in conf.py so the Sphinx graphviz extension uses your empty string instead of its default:
inheritance_graph_attrs = dict(size='""')
Also, if you're hitting this issue then the graph may be too wide once you allow the size to be determined by Graphviz. You'll additionally want attribute rankdir="TB" so the tree goes from top to bottom instead of left to right:
inheritance_graph_attrs = dict(rankdir="TB", size='""')