svg_stack - combine multiple SVG elements into a single SVG element

Overview

svg_stack combines multiple SVG elements into a single SVG element. It can be called from the command line (less flexible) or called from the Python interface (more flexible).

This tool exists primarily exists to automatically composite SVG files into a single SVG file that remains compatible with Inkscape. If compatibility with Inkscape is not required, one can create an svg file with multiple, nested <svg> elements. Inkscape, however, doesn't seem to handle nested <svg> elements particularly well. Thus, this tool was born.

Example command line usage

For example, given the files red_ball.svg and blue_triangle.svg:

svg_stack.py --direction=h --margin=100 red_ball.svg blue_triangle.svg > shapes.svg

will stack them horizontally with a 100 px margin between them. The result will be in a file called shapes.svg.

Example Python usage

A Qt like API provides more advanced layout capabilities. For example:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import svg_stack as ss

doc = ss.Document()

layout1 = ss.HBoxLayout()
layout1.addSVG('red_ball.svg',alignment=ss.AlignTop|ss.AlignHCenter)
layout1.addSVG('blue_triangle.svg',alignment=ss.AlignCenter)

layout2 = ss.VBoxLayout()

layout2.addSVG('red_ball.svg',alignment=ss.AlignCenter)
layout2.addSVG('red_ball.svg',alignment=ss.AlignCenter)
layout2.addSVG('red_ball.svg',alignment=ss.AlignCenter)
layout1.addLayout(layout2)

doc.setLayout(layout1)

doc.save('qt_api_test.svg')

See also

• svg_utils does a very similar thing. (See also a related blog post.)

Meta-data

• License: MIT (see source code of svg_stack for full license)
• Author: Andrew D. Straw
• Contact: strawman@astraw.com
• Homepage: http://github.com/astraw/svg_stack
• Issue tracker: http://github.com/astraw/svg_stack/issues

Command-line usage

Usage: svg_stack FILE1 [FILE2] [...] [options]

concatenate SVG files

This will concatenate FILE1, FILE2, ... to a new svg file printed to
stdout.



Options:
  --version             show program's version number and exit
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --margin=MARGIN       size of margin (in any units, px default)
  --direction=DIRECTION
                        horizontal or vertical (or h or v)