Create PDF from Inkscape SVG without destroying fonts and effects

Question

i have a select box to style with css like this.

My style

select {
  background-color: #b9def8;
  border: none;
  border-radius: 2px;
  width: 260px;
  height: 60px;
  padding-left: 10px;
  font-size: 16px;
  color: #676863;
  background: url('../img/arrow-dropdown.png') no-repeat right #ddd;
  -webkit-appearance: none;
}

But with style above, normal select box become a select box like this.

What can i do now? Thanks.

Solution 1

You should upgrade your Inkscape to the PPA version Pre-0.49, my testing produced results using masking, clipping and a reference path difference:

To upgrade your inkscape, open up a terminal and issue the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:inkscape.dev/trunk
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install inkscape-trunk

This should remove the 0.48 version of inkscape and replace it with the pre-0.49 version you need for your pdf file.

Solution 2

You might also try converting your inkscape .svg file to .pdf using rsvg-convert from the librsvg2-bin package:

rsvg-convert -f pdf -o foo.pdf foo.svg

This preserved transparency in my file.

Solution 3

Okay, here's my two cents on a workaround for this.

I tried the previous answer using rsvg-convert, which worked fine for transparent items. Problem is now, I have an embedded image in my SVG that actually got rasterized with a very low resolution. Specifying a higher X/Y dpi for rsvg-convert didn't change that.

So I did the following, which resolved the issue:

1. "Rasterizing" the image into a PDF: rsvg-convert -f pdf -o rasterized.pdf orig.svg
2. Open the original image in Inkscape: inkscape orig.svg
3. Open the rasterized image (now containing transparent shapes, but also the rasterized embedded image) in Inkscape: inkscape rasterized.pdf
4. Ungroup all items in the latter until you get to the wrongly rasterized image
5. Copy the embedded image from 2. into the one from 4., replacing the wrongly rasterized one
6. Save it as PDF through Inkscape normally.

Result: Transparent shapes, and high-resolution images.

Solution 4

One solution I have found to solve this obvious bug, is: In Inkscape save as: EPS then epstopdf the file. Result is looking perfect

View more solutions

Comments

[Glutanimate]

What Inkscape build are you using? Transparencies and PDF export work fine for me (latest inkscape dev trunk from this PPA). Are you sure that transparencies are the real issue? Looks to me as though there are more things wrong with the PDF output. If worse comes to worst you can always export the file as a high-resolution raster and convert it to PDF with convert image filename.pdf.

[Tomas Aschan]

inkscape --version gives me Inkscape 0.48.4, after first printing the warning message (inkscape:19694): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "pixmap", a bunch of times. It was installed from the default repositories in Ubuntu 13.04. As for the pdf, I suppose there might be other problems as well (the font seems off, for example), but I would guess they are ultimately related.

[Glutanimate]

I think installing the latest dev build is worth a try. If you haven't used PPAs before please see here. You can always revert the changes with PPA-Purge. Those warnings you get are theming issues that shouldn't appear but nothing to worry about.

[Glutanimate]

Just to be clear, did you apply those effects to "Sydamerika" manually or are they part of a font?

[Jeremy Carlson]

Are you sure your PNG is just the gray part, and not the blue part?

[Pham Minh Tan]

My PNG images is a arrow with blue part around.