On 2007-September-20 , at 16:25 , Steve Litt wrote:
On Thursday 20 September 2007 09:38, Steve Litt wrote:
On Wednesday 19 September 2007 15:24, bulia byak wrote:
On 9/19/07, Claus Cyrny <claus.cyrny@...22...> wrote:
I got good results using ImageMagick (IM) for this. That way, I can even export SVGs as 16-bit /channel (but I guess that you only need 8-bit).
Imagemagick rasterizes SVG and makes a PDF with embedded bitmap. I assume what the original poster wanted was vector PDF.
Is there any way to make Imagemagick (convert) not rasterize the PDF? Could I perhaps save as a different vector format and go from there?
Thanks for this insight. I never knew there was such a thing as a vector PDF.
A little googling turned up the fact that this is a well known problem, discussed since at least 2005. So far it looks like the recommended solution is to use Batik (http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/batik/) plus FOP (http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/) to convert from standard SVG to vector PDF. It doesn't look at all trivial, so if anyone's done this already, please tell us how you did it.
I also found a reference that the Inkscape project was working on a vector PDF writer, but can't remember where I found it.
Inkscape 0.45.1 (the latest stable version) has very decent PDF capabilities, as bulia pointed out already. It can save transparency, gradients, etc. all in vector form (i.e. what PDF is _meant_ to be). The only limitation is about embedded bitmaps I think: i.e. you cannot import a bitmap image into Inkscape, add some vector stuff over it and export to PDF (it would loose the bitmap).
More generally, the wiki page about vector graphics is probably worth reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/