On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 6:30 PM, Mark Crutch <markc@...2744...> wrote:
Dennis,
Going back to the Sorceress image it's definitely the filters that are slowing it down. It might help to understand how filters work in the SVG world, as it makes it easier to understand how the various workarounds that people have suggested will help.
Filters are essentially bitmaps generated by performing a series of mathematical operations on each pixel in the rendered image. The more pixels that need to be rendered, the more maths there is to do, and the slower the rendering will be. Rendering to a bitmap doesn't just mean exporting to PNG though; every time Inkscape draws to the screen it has to render to a bitmap.
If your filtered object takes up (say) 50 pixels in the rendered image, it can be drawn a lot faster than if it takes up 500 pixels, as there's only a tenth of the pixels to calculate. That leads to my first suggestions:
I think inkscape's problem is it tries to render the whole image instead of only the visible part. That's why when we zoom in, the render process becomes increasingly slow.
I maybe wrong about how inkscape works here. That's just a guess work according to my experience.
Best Regards,