Uniconverter and sK1 to Read Corel Draw Format in Linux

I had some situation when my designer sent me a pretty nice logo in a .cdr (Corel Draw) format which I wanted to use in my web site. Searching over the internet showed there is a vector graphics editor which can handle this format, sK1.

I was unlucky to make it work under Fedora 11 and I could not locate how to handle the error I was getting. Neither installing with yum, nor compiling worked out.  I was constantly getting the same error (lack of education in python is a heavy burden that does not allow me to sleep):

$ sk1
python: Objects/stringobject.c:115: PyString_FromString: Assertion `str != ((void *)0)' failed.
/usr/bin/sk1: line 23:  4906 Aborted                 python -c "import sk1" "$1"

As soon as my goal was not to edit these files under Linux but only to read and use as graphics artwork, I thought that simply converting them in command line should be pretty much enough. So, I installed a converter I found at sK1 project web site.

$ yum search uniconv
Loaded plugins: dellsysidplugin2, fastestmirror, refresh-packagekit
================== Matched: uniconv
UniConvertor.x86_64 : Universal vector graphics translator
uniconvertor.x86_64 : Universal vector graphics translator

Fedora 11 repos contain Uniconverter, but, remembering the sad experience I described above, I grabbed the source code from the sK1 web site and built my own rpm.

mkdir -p ~/software/ && cd ~/software/
wget http://sk1project.org/modules.php?name=Products&product=uniconvertor&op=download
tar xvfz uniconvertor-1.1.4.tar.gz
cd UniConvertor-1.1.4/
python setup.py bdist_rpm
sudo yum -y localinstall --nogpgcheck dist/UniConvertor-1.1.4-1.x86_64.rpm
uniconv

Quite nice, the help section says:

Allowed input formats:
AI  - Adobe Illustrator files (postscript based)
CDR - CorelDRAW Graphics files (7-X3,X4 versions)
CDT - CorelDRAW templates files (7-X3,X4 versions)
CCX - Corel Compressed Exchange files
CMX - Corel Presentation Exchange files (CMX1 format)
SVG - Scalable Vector Graphics files
FIG - XFig files
CGM - Computer Graphics Metafile files
AFF - Draw files
WMF - Windows Metafile files
SK  - Sketch/Skencil files
SK1 - sK1 vector graphics files
PLT - HPGL for cutting plotter files

Allowed output formats:
AI  - Adobe Illustrator files (postscript based)
SVG - Scalable Vector Graphics files
CGM - Computer Graphics Metafile files
WMF - Windows Metafile files
SK  - Sketch/Skencil files
SK1 - sK1 vector graphics files
PDF - Portable Document Format
PS  - PostScript
PLT - HPGL for cutting plotter files

Example: uniconv drawing.cdr drawing.svg

Converting between formats works out great.

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