Inkscape - save as PDF destroys patterns

Question

When trying to save a copy to PDF (and also in print to file) the resulted file are broken. For example: if my pattern is small red dots, the pattern in the PDF are chunks of squares with small red dots.

I'm using Inkscape 0.91r on Ubuntu 14.04.

Any help would be very appreciated.

EDIT: Here is a visual example of the problem:

Solution 1

So - it is a bug, here.

But, for the meantime i found a workaround:

Choose objects with patterns and use a filter on them. This way Inkscape will rasterize them when saving as a PDF:

Before and after comparison:

The only problem is that the resulted file is much larger than the one with the broken pattern (in my case it was one order of magnitude: a 1.8MB file became 12MB).

I hope that it will help anyone who faces the same issue.

Solution 2

This is to be considered an Inkscape bug, according to me. See the following related bug reports on bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape:

• Pattern fill on text elements not exported to PDF
• SVG fill pattern lost on PDF export
• Pattern fill incomplete with PDF export and printing
• Patterns not exporting correctly to PDF
• some objects disappear when saving as pdf

Comments

[joojaa]

Fairly typically when you export to other formats then internal representations have to be flattened. In case of pattetns it would mean breaking ot into repeating objects. Even illustrator does this so i would say PDF does not support the concept of patterns in a way that could end up roudtripped back as pattetns. (If there are patterns in the spec i havent looked at them)

[Shai Efrati]

I don't want to go into the internals, but i'm pretty sure Inkscape patterns can be converted to vector objects when converted to PDF. I don't mind it will be flattened in any way that the Inkscape team will find suitable, but currently it's just not usable.