Hi Devon,
Blurs aren't working at all in PDF at the moment. The switch to convert blurs to bitmaps does nothing, as you've noted. Adib has said that it's on his list to do - See the following bug report - https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/200948
Since this is not a regression from 0.45.1, I'm sorry to say this probably won't be in a release until 0.47, which will be a while yet (September?). It may make it into a development release earlier than that, but there are no guarantees.
At this stage, a workaround is to export to bitmap, which is not ideal, but it does represent blurs well. Saving or printing to PS will also do blurs, but at least on Windows 0.46 these are often misaligned - see https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/205732 - I anticipate that will also be fixed by 0.47, but perhaps earlier.
I'm sorry this doesn't directly help you, but hopefully know where things are at indirectly helps.
Kind Regards,
Rygle.
Devon Scott-Tunkin wrote:
Is there anyway to get blur and transparency effects to export properly to pdf? I tried the latest dev build but selecting convert blur to bmp doesn't seem to do anything.