[I'm copying the cairo list as well, (yes, evil cross-posting). Feel free to include only inkscape or cairo lists in replies if appropriate.]
For the cairo list: This is a response I got on the inkscape-devel list when asking for some testing of "export to PDF" in inkscape with the recent cairo 1.5.2 snapshot.
On Wed, 31 Oct 2007 23:22:18 +0100, Tavmjong Bah wrote:
Output greatly improved over 1.4.8 (didn't save 1.4.10 sample)!
Great!
Tested using SVG from:
Ooh. That looks like a pretty nice test. I'll definitely have to play with that some.
A few problems with evince (gradients).
Yes, this sounds expected as we've found bugs in evince/poppler exposed by the recent improvements to cairo's PDF output. See this bug:
Poppler does not yet handle everything in the cairo test suite https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12143
as well as the other bugs it depends on. Specifically, this one is probably the one you're hitting:
Poppler doesn't correctly handle gradients with transparency https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12144
Acroread looks good.
That's good. That puts the bugs in poppler's court, not cairo's.
Patterns, clipping, and masking still appear to be unsupported.
And this is where things get interesting. I think cairo-pdf should support all of that. So either something is still in missing in cairo that I'm not aware of, or something could be improved in inkscape with regards to the way it is using cairo, (or some combination of course).
If anyone that could take a closer look and give more details about any of these issues, that would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for the quick feedback!
-Carl