I have created a design in Inkscape that will be going on some t-shirts. The company producing the t-shirts needs the format to be vector based and in either .ais or .eps formats. I don't have Adobe Illustrator but do have Photoshop. So here is the question, the design I've created in Inkscape features a gradient pattern of an image, but when it's converted to the .eps format it doesn't show the gradient, only the original image. Is there a way to save my design in .eps and keep the gradient of the image that I created in Inkscape?

The issue is that EPS does not have any support for gradients. Adobe Illustrator gets around this problem by converting the gradient object to a bitmap - which means it's no longer pure vector. I don't think Inkscape yet has the smarts to do this. Although, I thought I read somewhere that 0.46 will have a feature to rasterise objects manually.

Anyway, I would be really surprised if your printers didn't support TIFF or another common raster format - in which case I would save the drawing as PNG then open it in a raster editor and convert it to TIFF. Note that an EPS file can also contain a TIFF - it's not vector but so long as you keep the resolution high enough it shouldn't matter.

If you have not other choice, provide me with a link to the file and I'll attempt to covert it directly to EPS for you using Adobe Illustrator.