Inkscape: How can I make a multi-paged document in it?

Question

I've picked Inkscape as a replacement of CorelDRAW on my Windows. It's free, so of course there have to be a few backdrops in face of its mighty ability to create perfect XML code for images. However, suppose I want to create a 10-paged documentary on Indian politics. Or anything. Now, how do I do it?

Making a folder and saving each page separately as an .svg file would be messy. So my question is this:

How can I, given that I can in the first place, make a multi-paged document with Inkscape? Even if the answer is "No, you can't," please say so in an answer.

Solution 1

Today there is no native multi-page support in Inkscape due to limitations of the strictly implemented SVG specifications (multi-page support was only introduced in SVG 1.2. draft which was never released but dropped in favour of the upcoming SVG 2.0).

To overcome this an external plugin inkscape-pages provides multi-page support through generating a master page with links to subpages. However this plugin will not produce SVG 2.0 code for future compatibility. Nevertheless it will help creating multiple pages for later export to PDF (e.g. with the help of pdftk ).

Solution 2

If there are not many pages, try saving them as separate single page PDF files after editing with Inkscape and then merge using some tool like PDF fill. I do not know if it may lead to some problems later, but it worked for me when I tried with 3 PDF files.

Solution 3

I wrote a tool that generates a multi-page PDF from your Inkscape document; it uses the common trick of "layers as pages". I call it ink2pdf, get it here: https://github.com/spook/ink2pdf .

It also allows conditional tags and custom layer-to-page mapping simply by how you name the layers. Hope it helps!

Comments

[Abhimanyu]

The extension worked well for the first time but later started giving errors and all the content of two pages was crammed into one. But that can be some other fault, as the extension worked seamlessly for the first time, albeit some poor UI. I will stick to making a folder with a list of separate svg files... Until the day comes.

[LukeJKendall]

I got lots of errors like this when I installed it in Inkscape 0.48.4 under Ubuntu 14.04: ** (inkscape:26506): CRITICAL **: Inkscape::Extension::Extension* Inkscape::Extension::build_from_reprdoc(Inkscape::XML::Docum‌​ent*, Inkscape::Extension::Implementation::Implementation*): assertion 'doc != NULL' failed ** (inkscape:26506): WARNING **: Unable to create extension from definition file /usr/share/inkscape/extensions/pages_addlayer.inx. The install script doesn't chmod o+r all the copied files, nor chmod +x the .py file.

[modulitos]

I have a very long PDF file, and I only need to fill out a few pages, then return it as a PDF. The multi-page plugin seems to work, except I can't seem to import the whole document at once. The only way I know how to do it is by using the plugin to create a multi-page doc, then importing one page at a time. Is there a way to import a multi-page into a multi-page inkscape doc?