Exporting to PDF should *not* take hours and multiple operating systems (Oh, and it should be real PDF, not dozens of images...)
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Okay, I decided to work on the product datasheet (one page take-away with the key information, what the product does, what its features are, and where to get more information). Have a first draft done and decide to test it. Prints out fine on Rose's HP BubbleJet (modulo the limitations of the printer itself) across a CUPS server.
Fine, now to create a downloadable PDF for the website (and review by others). Hmm, ps2pdf can't handle the Inkscape-generated .ps file for a print. Okay, try exporting to PS or EPS, nothing can read the output (syntax errors). Weird. Okay, try printing on Win32 from Inkscape with PDFCreator... 25MB of printing data, an age or two of processing on the old machine... and out pops a PDF that's just a set of images composed on a page (it looks horrible, and it's 6MB!)
This is just weird. This is a common-enough requirement that it's considered just another format for saving to (not even an export). Why would it be failing? This isn't a particularly complex graphic, even considering the captured diagrams. Sigh. Guess it's time to file a bug report with Inkscape. Good thing this is a public document.
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Mike C. Fletcher, the VRPlumber, is a philosopher of design turned computer programmer based in Toronto, Canada. He works primarily in the Python programming language, and maintains a large number of Open Source software packages. You can reach him at: mcfletch@vrplumber.com.
Eric Moritz on 06/08/2005 8:43 a.m. #
I not sure what you are using to create the datasheet but open office exports to pdf
Mike Fletcher on 06/09/2005 10:01 a.m. #
Yup, OOo certainly does a nice job on PDFs, but I'm using Inkscape (all of the source graphics are SVGs already). Turns out that the problems are that Inkscape is producing different outlines for every copy of a font-glyph.<br />
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The poor rendering in kpdf hasn't been explained yet. Using ghostscript on a Win32 machine I can convert to PDF from the EPS or PS (ghostscript doesn't work on my machine at all). Under Win32 the text renders perfectly well from the resulting PDF, it's just that it's a huge file.