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