But this sounds more like 'no optimisation', and a lot of complexity to maintain. I'm scratching my head over the toolchain chosen. The output is PNG, EPS, PDF,

But this sounds more like 'no optimisation', and a lot of complexity to maintain. I'm scratching my head over the toolchain chosen. The output is PNG, EPS, PDF, SVG, but you're using Inkscape and Ghostscript? Something seems off there. Cairo has all of those backends already, it's fast and you can call it from python (via pycairo). What's more, Inkscape already uses it as a backend. There's even another schematic editor (gEDA) that uses it, AFAIK. But, I presume you didn't use cairo for a reason - or you are using it, but need those other tools to post-process its output somehow. I'd be interested to know why?