Stephane Eybert wrote:

Dear all,

I installed inkscape 0.46 on Kubuntu 8.04 and can now save as pdf with pdf files having a very reasonable file size of barely under 100kb. Good!

But I still have an issue and wonder if there isn't something wrong with my pdf files.

I have put them at

http://www.thalasoft.com/brochure_en.pdf

http://www.thalasoft..com/brochure_se.pdf http://www.thalasoft.com/brochure_se.pdf

http://www.thalasoft.com/brochure_fr.pdf

for you to see.

They are very slow to load up in the kpdf reader, something like 10 seconds to appear.

The problem is the ellipses in the background are each drawn in the PDF with an soft mask due to the fill/stroke opacity set to less than 100%. This means each individual ellipse is drawn to an image buffer the size of the page, the mask function is drawn to another image buffer the size of the page. The ellipse image is then composited with the mask image back on to the page. With all the ellipses on the page this is not going to be fast.

The workaround is to set the master opacity to 100% and instead use the alpha in the stroke paint to control the transparency.

This is something that should be optimized in Inkscape. Currently Inkscape calls cairo_paint_with_alpha() when the opacity is less then 100%. This is required to handle the general case of drawing a combined fill and stroke to prevent a translucent stroke compositing with the fill. Calling cairo_paint_with_alpha() results in a soft mask being used in the PDF file. If only a fill or stroke is drawn, Inkscape should instead adjust the alpha value of the fill or stroke and avoid calling cairo_paint_with_alpha().

I suggest filing a bug requesting this optimization and attaching your SVG and PDF files.