Hi,

I've got parts of this question out on the Inkscape user mailing list, but I'm hoping to find a solution today if possible and I haven't had a resolution there yet, so...

I'm trying to print a book cover I designed in Inkscape (see it in this thread), and I'm having trouble with the blurs I've used in the image. I ultimately need to provide the printer with a pdf (nothing else will do in this case), so I installed the latest windows build of Inkscape so I could take advantage of the blur-to-bitmap functionality on pdf export. That part worked fine, but when I printed the resulting pdf, you could see the bounding boxes of each blur instance. The bounding boxes are detectable because they alter the color of the background under each bounding box. Obviously that won't look good, so I'm hoping for one of the following possible solutions:

1) Is there a setting I'm missing to rid the final pdf of these bounding box ghosts? Oddly, they don't show up in the pdf file when I view it on my monitor. They only appear when the pdf is printed. If I could solve this problem, then this approach would be the best solution since it keeps most of the image as vector.

2) As an alternate approach, I could output the whole cover as a png at 300 dpi, then import that png into a new Inkscape document and output that as a pdf. But in this case, how do I set the dpi of the png included in a pdf? The cover dimensions are 5.25 inches by 8 inches. At 300 dpi, my imported png is 1575 pixels by 2400 pixels.

3) Not really an Inkscape solution, but I'll ask here in case anybody knows ... I've also tried exporting the cover at 300dpi and then importing it into Scribus. In this case, I can in fact get the 300dpi png to fit perfectly into the 5.25 x 8 inch cover size, but Scribus seems to lose image quality on import of the png. The result is fairly jagged, as if anti-aliasing has somehow been turned back off in the original image. I did some searching on this issue and can't find where anybody else has it, so it must be some basic, obvious setting that I'm somehow missing. If anybody could point me in the right direction here, this would also be a workable solution. (And, FWIW, I also tried converting my png to a tiff in Gimp and using the tiff in Scribus, but I got the same jagged result. And, note, the original images - whether png ot tiff - are not jagged at all.)

Any help would be appreciated. I'm on Windows XP for this stage of the project, but could possibly move things to my Ubuntu laptop (though color will suffer there thanks to a crappy lcd monitor).

Thanks,

Matt

this may sound like a stupid suggestion, but if possible, don't use blur. The yellow glow of brew could be replaced with a gradient. But I Can't think of a work around for the cloud.

Aside from that, I would recommend saving as a high resolution PNG. I can't explain Scribus's behaviour when opening the file, but when you save it as PDF does the image still look poor? Alternatively, install PDFCreator and print the PNG from any application that can open it.

2. I think you can export the png in 300 dpi, open it in another Inkscape document and then resize to the original "page size" (because the 300 dpi will be one huge image). But to be on the safe side I would use that 300 dpi png with Scribus, you can set an option there what dpi to use for images when exporting to pdf.

3. When you save a pdf file from Scribus does it look good? I remember a while ago when using Scribus images look very bad when editing scribus document but looked perfectly fine when you export. It may be just a setting in Scribus preferences to display images low quality to save on resources or something.

Thanks for the replies.

I've discovered that the bounding box issue is related to gradients - either in addition to or instead of blurs. So I've got some test prints going today that will help me nail down exactly what's going on. I'll come back when I have the test prints and can say more.

Thanks again,

Matt