Dear Inkscape Developers,
I use Inkscape regularly to edit figures for scientific publications. Because I like to use transparency effects but many journals only accept EPS files for publication, I ran into the well-known "transparency and PostScript export" problem. First I used to remove the transparency by hand as described in the "Tips and Tricks" tutorial [1]. This has been a hard job and sometimes it is virtually impossible.
To facilitate this task I have automated this workaround (removing transparency by adding shapes covering the overlapping areas with the corresponding mixed color). So far I am quite happy with that solution, although it obviously does not work for gradients etc., and I would like to include it in the official Inkscape version.
In this regard I have a few questions to you:
1) Are there any general objections to add this code to Inkscape?
2) Where would you place this function in the UI? (For my personal use I have added the item "Remove Transparency" to the Path menu, which probably is not appropriate.) Related to this question is the question how to deal with the limited ability of this approach in order to not confuse or annoy users (e.g. when they use it with gradients).
3) Where would you ideally add the code for this feature? Currently I have added four functions sp_remove_transparency*() to splivarot.cpp. I chose this file because of the relation to sp_selected_path_intersect(). Also, I have copied some code from sp_selected_path_boolop() to get the intersection shapes and I suggest to put the common code in a more generic boolean operation function in order to avoid duplicate code.
I'm looking forward to receive your comments and thoughts.
Thanks, Marco