Hi,
I attached the patch which can be used to try out PDF printing with Cairo. It's still in the early stages of development, with rudimentary text support, image support, and gradient support. In order to use native non-alpha gradients in PDF a patch for Cairo has to be applied (otherwise the result will be just fallback images when using gradients) which can be found there: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/cairo/2006-June/007300.html [note that this patch introduces a bug: fallback images will be mistransformed]. First the patch.bin has to be applied to the inkscape source tree, then the pdf-cairo.* files have to be copied to src/extension/internal. Then do the usual build process starting with invoking autogen. Please feel free to test this and report any of your findings on this list.
Best regards, miklos