A small gui to automate generating some pdfs from some CSV files.

There’s a small non-profit in my area helping people operate localized energy distribution (as producers and consumers). Each month, they receive a zip file containing the raw kiloWatt-hours produced and consumed by each participant over the past month as CSV files. So far the non-profit has been manually importing these CSVs into LibreOffice to generate graphs and tables and export the whole thing as an individualized PDF file for each participant. Now that they’re starting to help more than 2-3 operations, it’s become useful to try to automate that process.

I’ve been writing it in rust for a few reasons. First of all I wanted cross-compilation to be sure to work and at this point I’m more familiar with rust than go, secondly I read a blog post recently that evaluated rust gui solutions in terms of accessibility and IME-compatibility on windows. I started off looking for a “direct” pdf-writing library but eventually switched to using typst to generate the pdfs from templates I write. typst being written in rust has enabled me to bundle its engine into the program in a pretty-straightforward way.

I’m currently working on allowing the import of multiple sets of data so that the generated PDFs can show line plots of the electricity production and consumption over several months.