I'd like to hear from all who use Inkscape for professional jobs that go to print.

What output formats do you use most often?

What problems cause you the most trouble?

Any other advice for making life easy with Inkscape print jobs?

Thanks!

I use PDF pretty much exclusively when I send jobs to a print shop. The most recent version of Inkscape has a great PDF exporter, which preserves alpha, clipping paths, and image transparency (some of which were lacking from previous versions). Here are a couple recommendations for your files:

Up- and downsample all colour images to 300 dpi -- this is simple, but a bit of effort. First, click on the image in Inkscape, take a look at its width and height, then right-click and choose 'Edit Externally...' In Linux with Inkscape 0.47, at least, this will fire up the GIMP. In GIMP, click 'Image > Scale Image' and change the X and Y resolution to 300, then change the width and height to the width and height of the image as it is in the document (in inches or mm, not pixels). Do the same with black-and-white indexed images, only change them to 600 dpi.

Embed all fonts!

Try to set up a colour proofing setup that roughly matches the type of printer you'll be sending your file to, and use colour proofing often. Colour-matching is one of the biggest headaches I have with Inkscape.

Thanks! Hoping to hear from more people, too.

I'm using 0.47pre4 mostly now and it is a big improvement. But sometimes the PDF files gets very large, or Inkscape hangs (never finishes) producing them, if the image is very complicated.

When you say "embed all fonts", you mean I should check the check box on the PDF options when I save the file, correct?

I can imagine color matching to be a big problem. I only have a bad old inkjet printer. I hope to get more real printer samples of output as I go along.

Thanks again!

Kjohrf wrote:When you say "embed all fonts", you mean I should check the check box on the PDF options when I save the file, correct?

I don't «use Inkscape for professional jobs that go to print» - but here's what I know about PDF font embedding with Inkscape 0.47(pre):

• Font embedding into PDFs is not the same as converting all text objects to paths on export.
• With Inkscape 0.47 fonts are always embedded in the exported PDF except if you convert the text to paths (there is no more text whose fonts could be embedded ;-).
• However - the export option 'Convert texts to paths' is currently (0.47pre4) broken (see bug #388257 ) - that's why your PDFs are exploding in size. Workaround if you need to use paths only: convert the texts using 'Objects > Object to Path' right before you save a copy as PDF; do not save the SVG with the converted text objects if you still need to edit the text.

Good information - thanks! I'll follow that bug and hope it is fixed by 0.47 release.