Brochures

The brochure pipelines generates City Ratings brochures based off the City Ratings Results.

How it works

The pipeline starts by converting the original city ratings file, to the shortcode version. Basically, that just means converting the headers to a 2-5 letter code, and performing some minor conversions and validation of the data. For instance "opportunity" becomes "op" and the value gets converted from "45.11" to "45".

The next step is to perform a data-merge operation between the shortcode file which was just created and the brochure template. This step will generate one SVG file per city. At this point the SVG itself is completely distributable if only an image is needed.

To make it more portable, the following step will convert all the SVG files into PDF files.

Then we add extra pages to the brochure. Typically the extra pages contain instructions to help cities to implement better policies and safer street designs.

Finally we bundle the brochures by country or state to simplify their distribution.

Brochure Pipeline

Rendering

Here is an example of the SVG file being generated at the beginning of the process.

Brochure Rendering For Austin, TX

Run it locally

Requirements

Rust
Inkscape
Montserrat Font
Dharma Gothic Extended Font

Run it

This pipeline was written in Rust and can be run locally with the following commands:

cd pipelines/brochures
cargo run

This will produce the following output:

2022-10-05T01:53:20.508083Z  INFO brochures: 📁 Creating the output directory...
2022-10-05T01:53:20.508248Z  INFO brochures: ⚙️  Copying the brochure template...
2022-10-05T01:53:20.509215Z  INFO brochures: 🔄 Converting the City Ratings file to a Shortcode file...
2022-10-05T01:53:20.925506Z  INFO brochures: 📄 Generating SVG files...
2022-10-05T01:53:21.346107Z DEBUG brochures: 🗄️  Collecting the generated SVG files...
2022-10-05T01:53:21.348323Z  INFO brochures: 📃 Generating PDF files...
2022-10-05T01:54:14.165587Z  INFO brochures: 📦 Bundling the brochures...
2022-10-05T01:54:26.702501Z  INFO brochures: ✅ Done

Remark

By default, the pipeline is configured to process the latest City Ratings file with the latest version fo the template.

If another data set needs to be processed, the parameters may need to be adjusted. This can be done at the top of the script, in the parameters section:

// Parameters
let format = "v23";
let city_rating_version = "v23.2";