Hi all, I talked with Carl a bit more today about the PDF functionality with Cairo and what it'd take to use it with Inkscape. Here's some additional info. Carl, correct me if I've captured any of this wrong. Some clarification on libsvg, when Carl said he wasn't supporting it, I interpreted this to mean it needed another maintainer. He clarified this; the reasons he had forked libsvg from librsvg originally was to try out replacing its libart backend with a cairo backend. Now that librsvg uses cairo as it's back end, there's no reason for libsvg to be used, and in fact it lacks capabilities that are in librsvg. So... The plan going forward would be this. svg2pdf as it exists now is probably ok for a start; it's at least better than we got now, and fits within our existing system. I think it's mainly going to be a packaging issue to hook it into our extension framework. Beyond that, svg2png needs to be modified to use librsvg instead of libsvg. This is probably a fairly simple task, as svg2png is a really short bit of code. I told Carl about UberConverter. He wasn't sure if the design of Cairo's PDF functionality would match UberConverter's structure, so a crs2pdf via Cairo may not be the right approach. Carl also mentioned something called Poppler(?) which does PDF _import_, that works in conjunction with Cairo, and that would give us a good round-trip to and from PDF. This sounds worth checking out. Bryce

Poppler is the freedesktop engine for rendering PDFs. It is a friendly fork of XPDF with some hacks from KPDF. Evince uses it. The end goal is that anybody can write a frontend and not have to work about the backend. It may also do other things that I am not aware of.

Carl also mentioned something called Poppler(?) which does PDF _import_, that works in conjunction with Cairo, and that would give us a good round-trip to and from PDF. This sounds worth checking out.

we need to figure out how we want to handle multiple pages in Inkscape in general.

> we need to figure out how we want to handle multiple pages in > Inkscape in general. Put them into different layers?

Unfortunately we don't have the freedom that Adobe did when making the PDF format. We have to work within the SVG spec, which as far as I know, does not have the ability to store multiple pages in one document

>> Put them into different layers? > I'd rather import each to a different document, or at least have the > option to do so. Unfortunately we don't have the freedom that Adobe did when making the PDF format. We have to work within the SVG spec, which as far as I know, does not have the ability to store multiple pages in one document (perhaps using viewboxes could accomplish this). For example, we currently achieve "Layers" with the clever use of groups, but it's transparent to the user. I do agree that the option to import to more than one document would be handy though.