I took the same background.svg file and exported it as a png and used it in the
slides.style file and it worked find. I was able to see the background in the pdf
output. The issue seems to be only with svgs.

In fact, it seems to be a bug in uniconvertor or its interface with rst2pdf.

I'll take a lok at it tomorrow.

I can't reproduce it, but it may be a problem with 0.11.

Could you try with latest SVN? It's not too hard to install.

I pulled down the latest svn copy and installed it on a different ubuntu jaunty
machine and got the following error.

elake@jaunty:~$ rst2pdf slides.txt -b1 -s slides.style 
/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/uniconvertor/app/utils/locale_utils.py:9:
DeprecationWarning: The popen2 module is deprecated.  Use the subprocess module.
  from popen2 import popen2
Cannot list directory /home/elake/.uniconvertor:[Errno 2] No such file or directory:
'/home/elake/.uniconvertor'
ignoring it in font_path
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/rst2pdf", line 8, in <module>
    load_entry_point('rst2pdf==0.11.dev-r997', 'console_scripts', 'rst2pdf')()
  File
"/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/rst2pdf-0.11.dev_r997-py2.6.egg/rst2pdf/createpdf.py",
line 2197, in main
    compressed=options.compressed)
  File
"/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/rst2pdf-0.11.dev_r997-py2.6.egg/rst2pdf/createpdf.py",
line 1749, in createPdf
    pdfdoc.multiBuild(elements)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/reportlab/platypus/doctemplate.py", line
855, in multiBuild
    self.build(tempStory, filename, canvasmaker)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/reportlab/platypus/doctemplate.py", line
774, in build
    self.clean_hanging()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/reportlab/platypus/doctemplate.py", line
412, in clean_hanging
    self.handle_flowable(self._hanging)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/reportlab/platypus/doctemplate.py", line
659, in handle_flowable
    f.apply(self)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/reportlab/platypus/doctemplate.py", line
118, in apply
    getattr(doc,arn)(*args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/reportlab/platypus/doctemplate.py", line
435, in handle_pageBegin
    self.pageTemplate.beforeDrawPage(self.canv,self)
  File
"/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/rst2pdf-0.11.dev_r997-py2.6.egg/rst2pdf/createpdf.py",
line 1878, in beforeDrawPage
    self.styles.pw, self.styles.ph)
  File
"/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/rst2pdf-0.11.dev_r997-py2.6.egg/rst2pdf/svgimage.py",
line 55, in __init__
    self.doc = load.load_drawing(filename)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/uniconvertor/app/io/load.py", line 364, in
load_drawing
    return load_drawing_from_file(file, filename)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/uniconvertor/app/io/load.py", line 316, in
load_drawing_from_file
    line = file.readline()
AttributeError: 'unicode' object has no attribute 'readline'

Ok, I will try to reproduce it again then.

versions of uniconvertor and reportlab, please?

python-reportlab Version: 2.3-0ubuntu11
python-uniconvertor Version: 1.1.3-4ubuntu1

I took a look at the
/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/rst2pdf-0.11-py2.6.egg/rst2pdf/svgimage.py
code and I saw that svglib is the prefered way to work with the svg files. I have
since installed svglib and now the 'rst2pdf slides.txt -b1 -s slides.style' works
fine. The only output messages are about using subprocess instead of popen2.

/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/uniconvertor/app/utils/locale_utils.py:9:
DeprecationWarning: The popen2 module is deprecated.  Use the subprocess module.
  from popen2 import popen2

I still see this as a possible issue in uniconvertor. On a side note I ran
'uniconvertor background.svg background.pdf' and it was able to make the pdf with no
problem.

Lastly ... the stuff above was done using the 0.11 version installed from
easy_install -U rst2pdf not from svn.

I just can't reproduce it :-(

I wonder why there are several errors that *only* happen on Ubuntu.

Ok, just guessing here, but it seems the problem is line 350 in uniconvertor's 
load.py:

if type(filename) == StringType:

It's checking that filename is a str. It *may* be rst2pdf is sending unicode.

So, I am now encoding the filename as a utf-8 string (r1046), but this really looks 
like a uniconvertor bug, and have reported it at their forum:

http://sk1project.org/forum/viewthread.php?thread_id=48

I am marking it as fixed. Could you please check if it works correctly after r1046, 
with uniconvertor, without svglib?

I will be happy to test it. Is it already in svn? If so then I will update my checkout 
and give it a go tonight.

Yes, revision 1046 or higher. Thanks!

Just tried with uniconvertor and svn co 1048. Seems to be working however the resulting 
pdf does not look as good with uniconvertor as it does with svglib. You can see what I 
mean in the attached files. The first one was done without svglib installed. I then 
installed svglib and ran the same command to create the pdf as before using the same 
files.

uniconvertor-slides.pdf 110 KB   Download

svglib-slides.pdf 143 KB   Download

Indeed svglib looks much better. Ayway, verified that it works now :-)