Inkscape Community
Help Using Inkscape => Inkscape Beginners' Questions => Topic started by: StephenAE on November 29, 2018, 04:22:04 AM
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Hello Everyone,
I was look round for a programme to allow me to convert raster-based PDFs to vector-based, as the EMF created when printing is very large. and I found inkscape. What I read about it lead me to believe that it would be able to convert my PDFs.
I have installed it (v0.92) and loaded a PDF. It was 7 pages and inkscape only loaded one page. I just assume this is a limitation and can live with that. I then tried saving it in PDF format. I turned off "Rasterise filter affects" and saved, but it did not save the page in vector format.
The programme looks very good and I may well use it for other things in the futre, now that I have found it, but for now I just need to be able to find a solution to printing large PDFs across a network, which means I need to convert them to vector-based. I know I can by-pass EMF and print directly to the printer, but this is not a solution, just a work-around.
So, my questions are; Will this programme allow me to load raster PDFs and save them as vector? and if so, how?
Thank you.
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Welcome to the forum!
It won't be able to do it simply by re-saving the PDF. But it should be do-able. Possibly the "very large" part could be troublesome. But maybe not.
You'll need to open each page in Inkscape separately, select the raster contents, and do Path menu > Trace Bitmap. Being large, it might take several seconds to a minute or 2, to finish the trace. Then save as PDF again.
Inkscape does have an extension to handle multiple pages, which I think it accomplishes via PDF. Oh, it looks like there are 3 extensions. I've never used them, so I don't know which one might be better.
Multiple Pages (http://sourceforge.net/projects/inkscape-pages/) - probably the oldest of these 3
Multi-Page PDF Export (https://github.com/wvengen/inkscape-addons/tree/master/extensions)
MultiPage Export (https://inkscape.org/en/~olibia/%E2%98%85multipage-export-extension) - more info (https://github.com/olibia/inkscape-multipage-export)