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I've been having a devil of a time getting Inkscape to export PDFs cleanly and there don't seem to be very many answers out there on all the various wikis and tutorials. In particular, transparencies are a bit of a crap-shoot - sometimes the transparency will disappear and sometimes it'll be made into a solid block.

I've tried fiddling with the save-as-PDF settings in Inkscape and I've tried printing to a PDF using CutePDF with less than satisfactory results. Is there some method of exporting my file - or some method of creating my file - that I can use to get predictable results?

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Hopefully, @DA01 will chip in here. He's deeply familiar with Inkscape. – Alan Gilbertson♦ Feb 9 '12 at 21:45
I wouldn't say deeply...but I am a fan of it. I don't know the answer but my guess would be that SVG and PDF are simply different file formats and support different parts of each specification. There's a lot you can do with SVG in terms of transparency, blur, blending and the like and I'm assuming PDF simply isn't supporting that yet. You may have to run the SVG through Adobe Illustrator first in hopes that AI will convert it to a format the PDF will be happy with. – DA01 Feb 9 '12 at 23:41

2 Answers

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Are you trying to export to .PDF to keep the editing capabilities? Otherwise, if you're trying to share an image with someone from Inkscape, save it as a .JPG or .PNG (if a translucent background is needed).

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In the past, trying to save as a PNG/jpeg reduced the physical size and resolution of the image remarkably. Perhaps I'm just doing it wrong? – Zelbinian Feb 9 '12 at 20:47
Do you have the latest version of Inkscape downloaded? – kamalo Feb 9 '12 at 21:30
@Zelbinian, an SVG has no inherent size or resolution. It is only when you want to export as a PNG that Inkscape would ask for a size. Specify this to be as large as you want. – Abhranil Das Mar 18 '12 at 9:46
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Try using the Snipping tool that comes with Windows 7. If it's not already pinned to your task bar you will find it under,All Programs,Accessories. Looks like a pair of scissors. That will save it as a jpeg, then open the jpeg and print with the cute PDF.

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This probably isn't the solution Zelbinian is looking for; exporting to PDF would imply that vector objects are maintained. As the other answer pointed out, you could just export the file as a JPG anyway, taking a screenshot would be an inferior method in this case – John Jan 28 at 20:02

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