On 2015-04-15 22:45 (+0200), joakim@...1974... wrote:
Johan Engelen <...> writes:
On 7-3-2015 6:09, Martin Owens wrote:
We don't have a PDF editing workflow for example, just PDF-page importing & creation as separate jobs.
There is a PDF editing workflow: Inkscape opens a PDF, you edit a bit, you save and close. It's been a while since I've used that though. Don't know if perhaps only a few people use it.
I use it sometimes as well. It usually works pretty well.
Based on my experience in user support and bug triage, I never recommend such a workflow with Inkscape, mainly for two reasons:
1) High risk of destroying data: If this workflow is applied to a multi-page PDF file, Inkscape will happily overwrite the original PDF file with the single page just edited. All other pages in the original PDF file are lost (and can't be restored, unless the user kept a backup copy of the original PDF file).
2) Round-trip editing file formats like PDF repeatedly in Inkscape can quickly result in corruption or changed appearance which is hard (or impossible) to fix (often involving displaced gradients, masks, or pattern fills originating from the first PDF -> SVG conversion) - likely small incompatibilities between PDF support in poppler and cairo contribute to this, apart from the obvious differences between the supported feature set of the two file formats (PDF, SVG), and bugs in Inkscape's own conversion routines, as well as in poppler and/or cairo.
Inkscape cannot edit the PDF content directly, and we should not pretend it does (or ever will).
My recommendation to users: 1) open/import the PDF file 2) edit as needed 3) save as Inkscape SVG 4) export (save a copy) as PDF when needed 5) always edit the Inkscape SVG, never the exported PDF file
The cited workflow might be "ok" for one specific use case: one-time editing of a single-page PDF file (with varying results).
Regards, V