About pylibcdr

Parse Corel Draw vector graphics from Python using libcdr

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Python bindings for libcdr

Intro

Simple Python bindings for the libcdr. The binding chain is:

Python (CDRParser) → Cython (.pyx) → C++ (parser.cxx) → libcdr / librevenge

Installation

First, the libcdr newer than v0.1.8 must be compiled.

E.g. on Debian:

apt-get install automake cmake libtool libboost-all-dev libicu-dev liblcms2-dev librevenge-dev libcppunit-dev zlib1g-dev
git clone https://git.libreoffice.org/libcdr
cd libcdr
./autogen.sh
./configure
make && sudo make install

Then: pip install git+https://github.com/mpds-io/pylibcdr

The build steps (orchestrated automatically):

CMake configures using pylibcdr/CMakeLists.txt.
CMake invokes Cython to transpile libcdr_interface.pyx into libcdr_interface.cpp (via add_custom_command).
CMake compiles the generated .cpp and core/parser.cxx into the Python extension libcdr_interface (via Python_add_library), linking against libcdr and librevenge.

If CMake fails, delete any _skbuild/ or build/ temp directories before retrying.

Usage

import sys
from pylibcdr import CDRParser
parser = CDRParser(sys.argv[1])
print(parser.xml)   # raw XHTML/SVG string
print(parser.dict)  # parsed as a nested dict

Architecture

File	Role
`pylibcdr/__init__.py`	`CDRParser` class; converts XML string to dict via `dictify()`
`pylibcdr/libcdr_interface.pyx`	Cython bridge; calls `svg(char*)` from C++, raises `CDRException` on error strings
`pylibcdr/core/parser.cxx`	C++ core; uses `libcdr`/`librevenge` to parse CDR files, returns XHTML wrapping SVG pages
`pylibcdr/core/parser.h`	Header declaring `std::string svg(char* file)`
`pylibcdr/CMakeLists.txt`	CMake build: Cython transpilation + `Python_add_library` for the extension
`pylibcdr/cmake/`	Custom `Find*.cmake` modules for `libcdr` and `librevenge`
`pyproject.toml`	Project metadata and scikit-build-core configuration

The C++ svg() function returns an error string prefixed with "ERROR" on failure; the Cython layer detects this and raises CDRException.

The output of svg() is XHTML wrapping one or more SVG documents (one per page). CDRParser.xml exposes this raw string; CDRParser.dict parses it with xml.etree.ElementTree into a nested dict where repeated child tags become lists.

License

Inherited from the libcdr (MPL 2.0).

pylibcdr