mgp2pdf 0.11.0

MagicPoint to PDF converter

This is a quick-and-dirty MagicPoint to PDF converter.

It supports only a subset of MagicPoint, specifically, the subset I’ve used in my slides so far. If you send me your slide decks, I’ll make mgp2pdf handle them too.

SUPPORT.rst has a list of supported and unsupported features.

BUGS.rst has a list of known bugs.

Installation

pip install mgp2pdf

Usage

mgp2pdf [-v] [--unsafe] slides.mgp [-o output.pdf]
mgp2pdf [-v] [--unsafe] slides.mgp ... [-o directory]
mgp2pdf [-h|--help]

Why another converter?

I used mgp to produce slides for a Python course I taught at Vilnius University. However, since most of the students are not (yet) Linux users, they couldn’t use MagicPoint to view my slides at home. There are some converters from MagicPoint to PostScript/HTML, but the result either looks ugly, or doesn’t support Unicode characters. MagicPoint itself can produce a number of bitmaps (by taking screenshots), but those are big, and the conversion process is inconvenient (you cannot use your machine while mgp is busy rendering slides and taking screenshots).

I wrote a Python program to interpret MagicPoint commands and produce a PDF file using ReportLab. It can handle my slides (Lithuanian), but otherwise it is probably incomplete. Feel free to give it a try. File bugs for missing features, and I’ll see what I can do.

Resources

There’s a web page, of sorts, at https://mg.pov.lt/mgp2pdf

The source code can be found at https://github.com/mgedmin/mgp2pdf.

Report bugs at https://github.com/mgedmin/mgp2pdf/issues.

Licence: GPL v2 or v3 (https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html)

Changelog

0.11.0 (2024-10-09)

• Add support for Python 3.8, 3.9, 3.10, 3.11, 3.12, and 3.13.

• Drop support for Python 2.7, 3.5 and 3.6.

0.10.2 (2019-04-23)

• Add Python 3.6 and 3.7 support (no actual code changes required).

• Drop Python 3.3 and 3.4 support.

• Stop using :weight=bold and such when passing font patterns to fc-match; specify :weight=200 etc. Fixes “Unable to parse the pattern” from fc-match and “Could not find the font file for Sans:weight=bold” from mgp2pdf.

0.10.1 (2016-09-17)

• Correctly recognize ...-...-r fonts as roman (GH #6).

• Add support for cyan color (GH #5).

• Fix typo in error message (GH #4).

• Add Python 3.5 support.

• Drop Python 2.6 support.

0.10 (2015-01-06)

• %filter is disabled by default for being a security risk. Use --unsafe to enable.

• -o DIRECTORY is now supported.

• Interpret image paths relative to the location of the mgp file.

• Support Python 3.3 and up in addition to 2.6 and 2.7.

• More accurate text positioning (mgp2pdf no longer truncates the corrdinates to integral point values).

• More color names are now recognized: white, red, green, blue, yellow.

• Better font name recognition (requires fc-match from fontconfig).

• Improved error handling and reporting.

• Support %% comment syntax.

• Corrected handling of %default, %tab, %deffont.

• Implemented %include.

• Implemented %newimage -raise (also discovered that mgp itself ignores -raise).

• 100% test coverage.

0.9 (2014-05-09)

• First packaged release.