It seems to me that there is perhaps not one single person who knows enough about printing and Inkscape to be able to develop a concise guide for those wanting to use Inkscape for print media. So the purpose of this thread is to gather the knowledge from many Inkscape users (i.e. you ) in one area and then maybe compile a guide to include on the Wiki.

From my own experiance, all professional printers should accept images that meet the following requirements:

1. Images supplied as EPS
2. Images using CMYK colour model.

Some printers also accept PDF which is I believe is becoming the new industry standard for printing. Some also request AI but I would argue that those printers don't know what they're doing.

The issues as it applies to Inkscape and SVG are:

1. PDF and EPS formats have limited support for all the effects that are possible in SVG
2. SVG and Inkscape use RGB colour model.
3. SVG doesn't support bleeding?

These are the questions that need answering for successful use of Inkscape for print work:

1. What effects when used in an SVG drawing will not covert to PDF or EPS?
2. How do you define a colour model for a drawing?
3. Can Inkscape generate files with bleeds?
4. Are there work arounds?

Please contribute other requirements printers may have, other issues you are aware of, other questions that need answering, answers to the questions or general advise and experience.

Personal experience from trying to make a business card in Inkscape: blur and transparency would not appear when converted to SVG. Text positioning was different. (SVG was unusable).

My own advise at this point is that if you are paying for a print job, I would not provide the printers with an SVG unless they can gaurantee that the print will match what you see on the screen. Most printers will be using software that has limited or no support for SVG. I believe even Illustrator doesn't support the full SVG specification.

One work around to PDF's inability to describe all vector effects of the SVG specifications is to use PDFCreator or Batik Rasteriser to generate the PDF instead of Inkscapes built in PDF function. PDFCreator and Batik will produce a rasterised/bitmap version of the image in a PDF file. This will ensure all effects are rendered correctly and removes any possibility that the printers software will incorrectly interpret the vector data (since there will be no vector data at all.)

Things to look out for with this workaround:

• The resolution of the PDF. I'm not sure if PDFCreator lets you specify the resolution, but Batik does. You'll want to use a minimum resolution of 300dpi for normal print work - you could probably get away with less for shirts.
• The colour mode. I'm not sure if PDFCreator or Batik let's you specify the colour mode for the PDF or if will automatically be RGB.
• The background colour. If your drawing has an transparent background you'll need to make sure the resulting PDF also has an transparent colour. Batik lets you specify the background in ARGB format (A = alpha).

I always use Scribus when I need to print something with these steps:
-export as plain SVG
-separately export effects as PNGs
-convert PNG to CMYK TIFF using Gimp and Separate+ plugin
-finally import all that pieces together in Scribus and export as PDF.

If Inkscape could properly export PDF with CMYK images and effects rendered to bitmaps, there would be no need for this... But I don't complain. It's free and as a free app, Inkscape is awesome...

I found these Brazilian Portuguese links about using CMYK in Inkscape via a plugin.

Here is a google translated page:

http://translate.google.com/translate?u ... l=pt&tl=en

Google wont translate this one for some reason so I have no idea what it says:

http://twiki.softwarelivre.org/bin/view ... asil/.CMYK