On 3/1/07, Nava Whiteford <nwhiteford@...1677...> wrote:

The best option appears to be outputing a pdf and using acroread to convert it to an eps, this then "flattens" the tranparencies, while keeping them in vector format. I was wondering if anyone else had a better (and open source) solution to this problem?

I think the best open source candidate for implementing this functionality is Ghostscript. Maybe it even already does something like it - try it out.

If I wanted to investigate adding support for transparency flattening to inkscape where would I start? Does inkscape export to eps natively or is an external tool used?

We export PS/EPS natively. And we really might benefit from adding a flattening code for that export. However, please consider that this code is likely to become quite complex, involving the use of boolean ops etc. (unless of course you will do the simple approach of rasterizing everything with transparency). Will you be able to code this all to a good level of quality, and test and maintain it afterwards? More importantly, is Inkscape the best place for this code? We already export PDF with transparency which fully preserves the intent of the source. I think it is better to use a separate tool (Ghostscript) that specializes in "downgrading" this PDF into less capable formats, perhaps implementing various strategies for that. I think Ghostscript has much more expertise overall than Inkscape in PS/PDF.