hi I'm relatively new to this stuff so please bear with me I'm trying to make a character sheet for a pen and paper RPG I'm making for a friend of mine
I've got it how I like now but when I try and turn it into a PDF or png file the background is completely black and most of the text is missing and the image in general looks very dark why is this happening?

This is most probably because of a bug in the current 64bit Windows version of Inkscape (0.91).

See http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php ... own_issues
(printing and export to pdf behave similarly here)

Workarounds:
- Export to png instead
- use 32bit version
- put a white rectangle into the background

To be able to tell you why the text is missing we'd have to see the original svg and the pdf file as well as the export options you have checked.

the rectangle in the background works fine thanks for your help

The rectangle solved the missing text too?