I am in search of an alternative to Illustrator and gave Inkscape a try. However, after I created a sample file and saved it three different formats, svg, eps and pdf, Inkscape would only recognize the svg format and would not open the pdf or the eps formats. For me this is a major problem - what I really need is a program to edit eps and pdf files, often generated by other programs (mathematica, igor, ...). Is Inkscape moving in this direction, or should I be looking elsewhere?

Themis Matsoukas

Themis,

For PDF you should be looking for Inkscape 0.46 Haven't used EPS for a long time, not sure I'm of big help here, but I recall pstoedit with SVG plug-in is required to do that.

I would suggest that you might need to change the way you work. Even if you work with Illustrator, eps and pdf files only continue to be editable in Illustrator if Illustrator embeds the AI file into the EPS and PDF file. The AI file isn't seen by any viewers - it's only there because PDF and EPS have restricted features making them not edit-friendly. You can edit PDF and EPS files if they don't have an AI version embeded but you lack many of the features and some elements of the EPS/PDF may actually be rendered bitmaps if the format doesn't support some effects (i.e. transparent gradients).

Which ever software you choose, I would always work with the applications native file format and avoid editing PDF and EPS versions.

Here's an example of another issue that can occur:

1. Designer1 creates an image in Illustrator and save as PDF (with the AI version embeded)
2. Designer2 opens PDF in Inkscape, makes edits.
3. Designer1 opens the PDF in Illustrator and won't see any of the changes made by Designer2 because Illustrator is reading the embeded AI file instead of the PDF.

My situation is different from the one you describe. Often, my graph originates in a program such a mathematica. I need to be able to edit it by, say, adding annotations, latex equations, inset graphs etc, i.e. things that the native software (mathematica) is not designed to do. Illustrator allows me to do all of that with eps/pdf files produced by other applications (mathematica, other graphing program). That's the functionality I'm looking for. My complaint with Illustrator is that the Mac version is too bulky and slow, even on a pretty fast desktop, which is why I'm in search of a leaner (but at least as mean) alternative.

prokoudine wrote:For PDF you should be looking for Inkscape 0.46

Inkscape 0.45+0.46pre2. The Windows version opens all PDF files that I have tried. The Linux version does not recognize PDF file type in open or import dialogs. If I select "All files" and select a PDF file, I get an error (probably because inkscape expects an SVG file):

test.pdf:1: parser error : Start tag expected, '<' not found
%PDF-1.3
^

Another PDF issue I have is that text is imported as text (the only option "Text handling: Import text as text") and not paths.

fin wrote:Inkscape 0.45+0.46pre2. The Windows version opens all PDF files that I have tried. The Linux version does not recognize PDF file type in open or import dialogs.

And that was easy to fix (when someone tells you how): I installed poppler-devel package and re-compiled Inkscape.

I'm glad you found an answer. Thanks for posting the answer here for the rest of us.

Hi,
I have the same problem since I save graphs from R (statistical software) as eps files.
The best method that I found to fix the problem is to use pstoedit first (pstoedit graph.eps graph.svg) and then to edit the svg version of my graph.
Anyway, I agree that implementation of such a conversion process into Inkscape would be great!