PDF import mssing graphics and shapes

[bobbiescap]

Greetings all,

I didn't have autosave enabled and accidentally lost the drawing I was working on. I had however saved the document as a PDF, then combined it with another document using PDF Shuffler to form a single document consisting of two sides of a brochure. I have tried opening the PDF, and also importing it I have tried deleting the other side and saving the one page in PDF Shuffler, have tweaked import settings, I'm out of ideas and starting again, any help most appreciated, and thanks for reading.

Kind regards,
Rog

[brynn]

Hi Rog,
So you're hoping you can open the PDF in Inkscape, and get back the vector content you lost?

What happens when you try to open the PDF with Inkscape?  You didn't say exactly what happened, just implied that it didn't work.  For example, any error messages; it opened but something was missing; it opened but was blank; etc.?  Also, which Inkscape version, and which kind of operating system?

If you happen to have a PDF version that didn't go through that Shuffler program, you should be able to open it  in Inkscape without any problems.  But after being saved with that other format, might have inserted data which Inkscape doesn't recognize.

I guess there might be a chance of getting parts of the SVG code out of the PDF, using a text editor.  Probably not very easily, but seems theoretically possible.

Edit
If you could share the PDF, we might be able to investigate whether we could save the SVG code using a text editor.

[Moini]

@brynn: pdfshuffler just concatenates pdf pages, so it should work.

@Rog: make sure you import the correct page, and ungroup. pdfs contain a lot of groups, and sometimes some masks and clips, that you can remove (those are just black rectangles that you get on ungrouping). If you had any filters (e.g. blur) in your drawing, then those objects may have been rasterized during pdf export (depending on the export settings), and cannot be recovered as vector objects.

[brynn]

@brynn: pdfshuffler just concatenates pdf pages, so it should work.

Thanks for the info, Moini.  I wonder though, since Inkscape doesn't have native multiple page support, what would it do with a multi-page PDF?  Would it open a separate document for each page?  Or cram it all into one doc?

[Moini]

pdfshuffler is a graphical app that allows you to import any number of documents with any number of pages, and then to select the pages that you want to export to a new document. I'm using it frequently for attachments to business letters (e.g. to glue on the terms and conditions).


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Or are you asking about Inkscape? Inkscape offers you to choose the page you want to import.

[brynn]

Or are you asking about Inkscape? Inkscape offers you to choose the page you want to import.

Yes, that's the piece of info I was missing.  I was thinking if it's a multi-page PDF, and Inkscape can't handle multiple pages, what would it do?  Nothing - sees multiple pages, doesn't know what to do so does nothing.  Opens the first page, opens the last page, puts all the pages into one document. 

Thanks again 

[bobbiescap]

Thanks Moini and Brynn, I will get back to you with more information soon, am in Austalia and we have been having serious heatwaves, with the latest one topping them all, and I have shelved everything non essential until it cools a bit. It is possible to delete one page in PDF shuffler, save it, and load the single page because, as you say, Inkscape doesn't support multiple pages, also I couldn't see how to select a particular page on the import dialogue, will check again unless my version is out again, or I missed it. Inkscape defaults to the initual page anyway, which answers a question of yours Brynn. The initial page was the one I wanted, though of course, this may not always be the case. Multiple page handling might be a handy feature request? The original problem was that a large svg graphic was missing, plus some other minor things. Sorry about the poor description.

My options to create a simple three fold brochure were Libre Office, which is too fiddly to use for this purpose in my opinion, and Scribus, which I don't know, so I took the path of least resistance and  used Inkscape which i am getting better with all the time and seriously love it, the layout reminds me of early Corel Draw versions, but with modern power. I must learn Scribus BTW, am slowly getting back into things after an hiatus due to health.

[brynn]

This would not solve your problem.  But just fyi, there is an Inkscape extension which sort of offers multiple page support.  As far as I understand, it does it using PDF.  http://sourceforge.net/projects/inkscape-pages/