web and print with moinmoin, pdflatex, google charts and eastwood

As always, this is mainly a reminder to myself... We wanted to create a nice report/handbook that will be occasionally be printed, but in between printings should be a living (web) document. As typical for reports, it will contain charts and tables. We went with a wiki, which has pretty good tables and google charts looked like a perfect fit, until we saw that output is limited to png with a maximum resolution of 300k pixels. Then we found eastwood, a reimplementation of the google chart api in java with jfreechart as the back end.
So here's how we do it:

• each report section is a moinmoin wiki page


• limit yourself to moinmoin's native tables, footnotes, sections, enumerations, descriptions


• use moinmoin's HTML macro to add google charts inline


• for the print version, install Eastwood, the free java re-implementation of the google chart API


• into Eastwood, integrate the Batik library for rendering SVG


• use inkscape -z -E chart.eps chart.svg to convert svg to eps (eps works better than pdf for chart boundaries) and use epstopdf chart.eps to convert eps to pdf


• install the text_latex.py moinmoin formatter from moinmoin FormatterMarket (this adds a renderAsLatex action)


• use wget -O section.tex --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0" --user=user --password=pw 'http://your.moinmoin.site/section?action=format&mimetype=text/latex' (or curl -o section.text -A 'Mozilla/5.0' -u user:pw 'http://your.moinmoin.site/section?action=format&mimetype=text/latex') to download one of your wiki pages as LaTeX


• For professional stuff, hire a LaTeX expert to define/create a professional print layout and its associated macros


• use your script-fu (e.g. awk,sed) to fixup the moinmoin-translated LaTeX markup and e.g. to call the right latex macros for including the pdf charts


• use pdflatex for generating your print-format report


• Automate all of the above with ant, make, shell or even .bat files


• And editmoin allows you to use

  $EDITOR

  to edit content instead of a browser's textarea editor