On 2008-September-22 , at 15:33 , the Adib wrote:
I also use Inkscape to illustrate my documents. I use OpenOffice and Winword. I started using the .eps export but I could not see the imported file in my document.
Yes, that used to be a problem, and it may have been Inkscape's fault. OpenOffice and Word are supposed to support EPS but indeed EPS documents from Inkscape would not load. My understanding (which may well be wrong) is that those two programs use the bitmap preview in the EPS file to display the graphics within the text (but still use the vector information when printing to printer or PDF). So I suspect that Inkscape's EPS did not have the required preview embedded. But notice that all this is in the past tense. Because I just tried it again now and with a recent devel version of Inkscape and NeoOffice (the mac version of OpenOffice, which even lags a bit being the real OO in terms of releases) and it works. So I would go retry now if I were you.
Then I tried the .emf export but had problems on transparency, gradients, etc. Currently I only use .png that I export as 300 or 600 dpi. Also there will be strage resamplings when there is a need to somehow "zoom" the embedded picture.
Word and OO do not deal well with scaling images up or down indeed. But that may also just be a display issue, because the method used for live resizing should be fast. Is the resampling problem still present when printing into a PDF file?
As those pictures become large quite quickly I wonder how you deal with those issues.
I don't use Word or OO ;). When I absolutely have to use a desktop based word processor, I use Apple Pages (which deals with PDFs), or embed low resolution, low quality PNGs (90-100dpi with a reduced number of colors, converted from Inkscape's output with an ImageMagick script) in OO/Word and keep PDFs/EPSs for the final layout.
I read you are using pdf-export. The given .pdf states itself as Latex document. So you import .pdf into the Latex source ?
Yes pdfTeX obviously deals with PDF images, and very well in addition. So I just: \includegraphics{whatever.pdf} and that's it. Inkscape's (well Cairo's actually) PDFs give a warning in LaTeX (pdfTeX warning: pdflatex (file whatever.pdf): PDF inclusion: Page Group detected which pdfTeX can't handle. Ignoring it.) but which is harmless, as the warning message suggests. The document ends up having a decent size (25Mb for >200 pages) and printed fine on most printers I used (only 5 figures came out bad on the first batch on one specific printer. This had to do with strange transparency settings and clipped images. After some fiddling, the file printed fine.).
For such a document as a dissertation, I find LaTeX to be immensely superior to word processors (so much that I think it is worth learning only for that). For smaller documents, what I deal with are scientific articles or grant proposals. Both are within 10-30 pages, require collaboration between authors, and their final layout is usually not done by the authors. Therefore I just need to produce a sloppy draft which is what word processors are good at. Even though I still like to use LaTeX for those (particularly when there's math involved), I used the word processor component of Google Docs twice, for works with plenty of authors, and found the instant collaboration it allows to be very beneficial to the document (and to my personal sanity: have you ever tried to merge 5 versions of the same document edited with "track changes" in Word? If yes, you know what I mean ;) ).
I ope this helps and thanks for the kind words.
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/