SVG: Image Editing and Convertion with Python

#tutorial #python

For creating or editing images for social media, I generally use any of the following tools:

I usually prefer SVG over other formats, and have some templates for Instagram, that I modify whenever I have to announce a new blog post.

There's a GitLab repository where I upload JSON files with the content of every new post, where there's a Python script that takes care of posting to DEV, then shares the link on a new Post on X. I needed another script for editing the following image:

Image Editing

In the SVG, there's a <tspan> element with id='tspan1' that contains the text to modify Text. To edit it, you can use the xml.etree.ElementTree Python module as follows:

import subprocess
import os
import tempfile
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

file_name = "new-post.svg"
new title = "SVG: Image Editing and Convertion with Python"

with open(file_name, 'r', encoding='utf-8') as file:
    svg_content = file.read()

root = ET.fromstring(svg_content)

target_element = root.find(".//*[@id='tspan1']")

target_element.text = new_title

modified_svg = ET.tostring(root, encoding='unicode')

Previous code block does:

Read the content of the SVG file
Treat the content of the SVG file as XML with the ElementTree module
Find the <tspan> element
Replace the title
Convert the modified XML back to string

Image Convertion

Now to convert the modified SVG to PNG:

output_file = "new_post.png"
width = 1080
height = 1080

with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(mode='w', suffix='.svg', delete=False, encoding='utf-8') as temp_svg:
    temp_svg.write(modified_svg)
    temp_svg_path = temp_svg.name

command = [
    "inkscape",
    temp_svg_path,
    f"--export-filename={output_file}",
    f"--export-width={width}",
    f"--export-height={height}"
]

result = subprocess.run(command, check=True, capture_output=True, text=True)

os.remove(temp_svg_path)

Previous code does: