I grabbed an SVG file from Wikipedia that showed the infamous CIE 1931 chromaticity horseshoe to modify for an article I was writing. When opened in Inkscape, instead of the horseshoe there was a rectangular pixmap with the outlines of the horseshoe embedded in it.

Time for Mr Clipping Path to come to the rescue.

Except there were some weird results when trying to use the diagram, now with the horseshoe clipped out of the background pixmap so that it appeared as it does in the Wikipedia article:

* When imported into FrameMaker, the diagram appeared perfectly. (This is weird, because invariably FM introduces artefacts such as strange lines and white rectangles, requiring one to create a PDF of the SVG for import.) * When 'printed' to Adobe PDF, the resultant PDF file showed (a) a solid clipping outline as expected and (b) the actual colour horseshoe reduced in size and skewed to the right but still within the path, sort of like a jelly that has slumped on a hot summer's day. * When exported to PDF via Cairo, the clipping path had gone AWOL so that the PDF appeared as the SVG when I first opened it, a full rectangular pixmap. * When exported to EPS, the background pixmap also appeared unclipped as for the Cairo PDF.

Is anyone else experiencing these kinds of problems with clipping paths? Should this be logged as a bug?

Regards, Hedley

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Hedley Finger

28 Regent Street Camberwell VIC 3124 Australia Tel. +61 3 9809 1229 Fax. (call phone first) Mob. (cell) +61 412 461 558 Email. "Hedley Finger" <hfinger@...2483...>