I'm creating a vintage style design for a t-shirt with a weathered texture.
I heard that inkscape can't create print ready EPS files as it converts everything into raster files, then throw them all together into an EPS file (result=low quality).
The workaround is apparently to take your files to scribus. However, in order to do that, you need to delete clipping masks (which is very essential to my design right now) and create them manually instead. However, the type of clipping mask I'll have to recreate manually is a texture (see PNG below).
When I use this as a clipping mask, save it in the default inkscape format (SVG) and open it outside of inkscape, I get a blank SVG file.
Realizing that the raster image is conflicting with the vector, I tried converting the PNG to a vector (trace bitmap), the result however looks something like this:
I also tried converting it to a PDF and then to EPS using ghostscript, however, even as a PDF still, it looks like this:
Once again, I get a blank SVG when opening it outside of inkscape.
When exporting it as a PNG however, everything looks perfect:
Is there perhaps a workaround to this in the libre software? Or if nothing else another way of adding the texture?
Edit:
As suggested by one of the answers, I tried using these settings in Trace Bitmap:
The resulting vector (after changing the fill colour) was this:
However, this is the end result after setting the mask (i.e. Object > Mask > Set):
I noticed that after exporting this as a png that the white areas are transparent, however, when creating an EPS file, they're white again.