Hi to the team ! I just realized the 2 emails I sent to the inkscape-user ML were more appropriate on the devel ML (I first thought the devel ML was only for developers). I could just wait & see what happens, but it seems 0.48.1 is just around the corner, and I would feel guilty if some important bugs I stumbled upon were not reported in time !

Please allow me to copy/paste their content below :

[First mail : issues with patterns involving crashes]

Hi everyone !

First : thanks for the amazing work done by the Inkscape developers !

I'm a new casual Inkscape user :) I'm using it at the moment to carry on 
the work done by someone who owned inDesign. Thus, I used an .svg file 
that was exported from this piece of software.

The export went fine overall, except some fonts issues (for instance, I 
could only select the first line in text frames) and colours were 
generally not good.

I fixed almost anything by rewriting the text and changing colours but I 
encountered a few issues and problems in general with patterns.

Indeed :

in the document, there are a few polygons which are filled with a 
pattern which consists in many spirals. For some reasons the colours 
went wrong during the export but I couldn't change directly the colours 
used in the patterns. (more generally, I didn't know how to apply the 
same colours to many objects at the same time)

So I converted the pattern back to an object, changed to colours, 
converted it to a pattern, and applied it to the object. So it did the 
trick.

However I had many issues in the process :

1) Inkscape completely filled my memory twice and the kernel had to kill 
the task. This happened when using several times in a row the functions 
to convert patterns to objects or the contrary. All of a sudden, the 
hard drive began to spin non-stop (I have no swap but 4 GB of ram) and I 
could barely move my mouse cursor. It also happened when I was using the 
"node" tool to change the position / rotate etc. the pattern when 
applied to an object.

2) I managed to crash inkscape when undo-ing some operations that were 
involving a pattern <-> object conversion

Also, I was wondering if there was a simpler way to handle patterns ? 
(edit them afterwards / change their colours / remove them from the list ?)

3) to make the operation easier, I decided to change some colours 
directly in the pattern definition in the XML file. It seemed to worked 
: the drawing was displayed properly in Inkscape or when exporting to 
.png. But when exporting to .pdf, the modified patterns were invisible 
or trashed when zooming in. Oops !


Can you guys please tell me if I should file some bugreports ? Maybe 
those bugs are known and fixed in the upcoming 0.48.1 ?

(I'm also the one who filed the bugreport involving a font that was not 
displayed properly in Acrobat Reader under Windows, but was OK in Linux 
/ OSX....)

PS : I may upload the .svg file somewhere, if some of you are curious !

Best regards & thanks again to the team !
Mahen
[Second mail : Broken PDF files produced]

 
Hi again ! I would like to add some more data to my previous mail. I'm 
using Inkscape 0.48.

I assumed the faulty PDF file I obtained was due to my modifying the XML 
file directly. But it's actually not the case as it also happens with 
another document I didn't modify this way. Please let me show you some 
sample files :

1) http://mahen.free.fr/inkscape/Plaquette%20-%20Int%c3%a9rieur.svg
as you can see, there is in the bottom right corner a polygon which is 
filled with a pattern which contains many spirals
2) http://mahen.free.fr/inkscape/Plaquette%20-%20Int%c3%a9rieur.pdf
here is the resulting PDF

On my computer :
- the PDF takes about 5 to 10 seconds before being displayed !! 
(core2duo 3 GHz, 4 GB RAM). While the PDF file produced by inDesign 
(from which I exported this svg before modofying it under Inkscape) was 
displayed instantly (but, the inkscape produced .pdf was almost 10 times 
heavier, it seems a couple of parts were converted to bitmaps, I wonder 
why).
- the bottom-right pattern is invisible (under evince / Ubuntu 10.10) 
when looking from far away. When zooming in, you can make out the 
polygon shape but it's filled with some kind of random pattern
- if I scroll in the document, from the PDF reader, it even makes it 
*crash* and slows down my system a lot !
(of course, there was no display problem under Inkscape itself)

It seems using some exported .svg files definitely don't please Inkscape 
a lot. Or this kind of patterns at least...

PS : I provided some font files used by the document in 
http://mahen.free.fr/inkscape/

Thanks ever so much for reading this !
Mahen