Hi all,
first I need to say that the Cairo PDF export is A W E S O M E !!! (now prepare for some nagging... ;)
For some weeks I was working on a bigger project (0.5 x 3 in meters ;) and it was quite an adventure to print it out... Inkscape 0.44 export didn't work for me, as I wanted pictures and transparency. So I compiled rev. 17189 from SVN on gentoo. (Sa, 26 Jan 2008)
To verify, use the SVGs in http://home.arcor.de/caliga/timeline.zip
Exporting without text-to-curves the result is: - Console: (inkscape:5847): WARNING **: Parameter <blurToBitmap> might not exists 9354,330078 1275,590576 - PDF-Output: about 1kb in size, therefore not completed...
one time I got: (inkscape:5847): CRITICAL **: SPObject* sp_object_unref(SPObject*, SPObject*): assertion `object != NULL' failed
Exporting with text-to-path: Well, today I could not reproduce it, but after a long time of swapping I saw messages similar to "Warning! Allocating large amount of memory. Possible memory leak." today it just said "Killed" after swapping arround for a while. (unfortunately I had to this on my old 512mb machine as my Laptop broke...)
I actually got a working PDF from the smaller version (Zeitstrahl 18.svg). Hey, I thought this is just vectors? How does size matter? Well, I suspect that the "preferred DPI" option plays a part here.
However, I needed the xxl version, with a lots of DPI ;). So I went to my friend with the big (!) printer (plotter) and installed Inkscape 0.46-pre0 (win). Direct printing didn't work, so we tried to create a PDF there. Without text-to-path we got an error message. With text-to-path it worked for "Zeitstrahl 19 xxl single.svg", but not for the double version. I think we had set "preferred DPI" to 150. However, later my friend told me that he *could* create a PDF from the double version...
Summary: Well... if you please, it would be nice if Inkscape could create a Cairo-PDF from Files like "Zeitstrahl 19 xxl double.svg" with any combination of options set, on a 500MB machine, in no time ;)
Thanks :) Daniel
P.S.: Another way of stressing Inkscape quite a bit (at least with 500MB RAM), is to select all objects of one timeline (in xxl double) and trying to group them. (Didn't work for me...)