Hi,
I attached the updated PDF printing extension with Cairo. Now it has proper transparency handling and better text handling. Also, now it has it's own entry in the Save As dialog as "Cairo PDF". In order to use it you have to apply the following patch to Cairo 1.2: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/cairo/2006-July/007477.htm Without applying the patch you will get only fallback images most of the time. I already separated the patch into smaller ones and submitted it to be incorporated into Cairo. The resulting text output in this version differs from that of Inkscape's regarding the positioning of glyphs. Text printed in PDF will usually occupy more space horizontally/vertically than as it can be seen in Inkscape. This is especially true for vertical text in which case spaces are smaller between words. Does anyone have an idea how I could get the exact glyph positions used by libnrtype to render glyphs? [I could only come up with crazy ideas like calling Layout::show with a prepared nr_arena and then extracting the glyphs later from that nr_arena] Unfortunately the output of the about screen for Inkscape version 0.40 isn't correct; it might be because of the mess with transparency inheritance. After applying patch.bin to the Inkscape source tree copy the other files in the archive to their respective location and do the usual build process. Please feel free to try it out and report your experience on the list.
Regards, miklos