Craig,

I have used the pdf printer route with Inkscape numerous times but have always been a bit disappointed. I tried again this evening using a recent cvs with a test file containing a rectangle (+radial gradient) +star (+linear gradient) + spiral +some text. While this is hardly of mind shattering complexity there was an awful lot of huffing and puffing.

Saved as svg the file size was 6KB. Saved as pdf the file size was 959KB.

then I changed the gradients to uniform grey. Saved as pdf the file size was still 575KB.

Some observations. I am using the PrimoPDF driver as downloaded, and saving in Screen mode. Win2000 and PentiumIII933.

The saving takes ages - as in a couple of minutes. However, once it gets there the pdf contains the colour and the gradients. I remember trying transparency as well some time ago and that was ok too. The line quality onscreen is pretty bad but improves with magnification up until the jaggies come in.

The slow speed and large file sizes are definitely a concern. I have not looked at what a "realistic" file would be like in terms of time. But if a svg file of say 60KB produced a pdf file of 10MB then I would doubt its use!

Having said that, I must admit there are lots of issues with PDFs and even a very fast program such as Xarax. There the gradients/transparencies/other special effects are often changed into bitmaps and produce huge files. Interestingly, exchanging gradients for say 20% grey in Xarax brings the file size back down to sensible figures. We do not seem to have quite got there yet.

Xarax also does not seem to suffer the time problems that Inkscape does. However, we know there are time problems and have done for some time. Maybe at this stage we should be thankful that we can get pdfs in this way at all.

There are also many PDF printer solutions out there. It would be good for someone to look at a few of them and find out which is the most efficient at this stage. Certainly pdf capability is a limiting factor in my use of Inkscape at present.

Erik

----- Original Message ----- From: "Craig Gotthardt" <craig2b@...586...> To: "'InkScape-Users'" inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net Sent: Thursday, April 07, 2005 8:54 PM Subject: [Inkscape-user] some pdf creation info

I have found that on xp (0.41.win.exe) CutePDF works to create a basic pdf directly from inkcsape. It installs as a printer. NOTE: ("dependency") needs Ghostscript to convert. I dont know about linux? But Im sure theres something out there to use. http://www.cutepdf.com/products/CutePDF/writer.asp

Craig