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I'm doing some research for an application that i might write. It would use cairo to draw some complex graphics (using math!), and users would want to export these graphics + some text and numbers (derived from the same math) into something printable (pdf is the obvious choice, but svg should be OK too - it's highly desirable that graphic object should be in a vector format, not raster, otherwise it doesn't print well). You know, like generating a report - that sort of thing.

Now, the graphic object should probably go as-is (no one really needs to alter it in any way; scale it maybe - that's all), but the layout of the page is something users should be able to change. Which means that there should be some kind of mechanism for creating page templates, and my application would just paste graphics and numbers into them.

Thus PDF is out of the question. That leaves SVG.

When i started writing this message, i thought that i was going to ask about clipboard formats Inkscape understands. I thought that it would be enough to just swap the cairo-gdk surface used in my drawing function for a cairo-svg surface, write svg into memory, put it into clipboard and somehow paste into Inkscape.

Now, don't get me wrong, that would _still_ be awesome. So if you know how to do it - i'm all ears.

But that, of course, won't do anything about the rest of the contents that should go into page.

So now i'm thinking of something different: create a template SVG document in Inkscape (putting placeholders in places where stuff should be inserted), give it to my application, and it will replace placehonders with real stuff (i hope i know XML well enough to just insert proper XML elements into right places) and save the result as an SVG.

However, Inkscape does not seem to be terribly good at layout out text either, and copy-pasting drawings from Inkscape to OpenOffice produced mixed results (and i still don't know how to do it programmatically). So...what would you advise me to do?

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