On Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:33:06 +0200, Tavmjong Bah wrote:

On Fri, 2008-06-20 at 08:55 +0000, rhenwood User wrote:

...

Hi Folks,

I'm running the Inkscape distributed with Ubuntu 8.04 [Inkscape 0.46, built Apr 7 2008] and PDFLatex included with the distribution.

When I save a drawing from Inkscape as 'Cairo PDF' I am unable to include it into my document with pdflatex:

PDF inclusion: Page Group detected which pdfTeX can't handle. Ignoring it.

I suspect Cairo export is configured to export page groups in anticipation of multi-page Inkscape in the future.... but this is speculation on my part.

What is apparent, however, is that Inkscape cannot be used as a drawing companion with pdfLatex out-of-the-box on the latest Ubuntu.

This is (for me at least) a break in my workflow. Any suggestions for a workaround?

Hi Tav,

I have been playing around with PS and PDF from Inkscape v0.46.

Are you using the "Save" dialog or the "Print" dialog? They use different routines to produce PDF files.

I'm using the 'save' dialog.

The PDF and PS files from the "Print" dialog with the "Vector" option have an extra blank page at the end. There is a program called pdftk that can extract pages from PDF files.

pdftk looks like a useful tool; thanks!

Other possibilities:

The Cairo based "Save" dialog PDF export doesn't seem to add an extra page at the end. It doesn't support Patterns, Clipping, and Masks and evince won't display the gradients with transparency correctly but Acroread will.

I'm not sure I understand; I thought Cairo was a libaray for vector drawing and Acroread is a tool to render PDF files?

I have previously used Inkscape, PDF export with latexPDF to create figures in my PDF documents with transparency. It looks very nice and I'm trying to reproduce this quality of document.

You could print to a PS file, remove the extra page in a text editor, and then use a program like ps2pdf to convert the file to PDF. You might have to also remove the "%%Pages" and "%Page" lines. One problem with this method is that on my test file (which has images, gradients, clips, and masks) the output is completely rasterized.

yeah, my temporary solution is to export to PNG, which works OK, but isn't ideal.

Another method would be to "Save" a PS file with the old (non-Cairo) exporter and then convert the file to PDF. This keeps most of the drawing in vector form.

right, but I loose my transparency i think... r,