I have a web client who has asked for some coupons for their website and I would like to use Inkscape for this. The need to be printable tho not worried about print quality really. So, should I offer a full color web version as well as the print version or no? Any advice would be great.

not sure of your particulars: but if they are only a fairly small coupon to be printed out, i would export to png, and try to layout it neatly. but printing from websites is always a bugger...

maybe try the PDF export from inkscape as an alternative... make sure you test it, i dont think all inkscape's drawing functions are supported by the inkscape PDF export function...

oh and to state the obvious don't use SVG... why? cos IE does not have native support

does anyone else have any ideas?

Yeah, don't use SVG on the website. Stupid IE.

I think the PDF producted by Inkscape is just a high resolution bitmap, so the only advantage to using it is that you can be sure it'll print to size.

My recommendation would be to create a high resolution PNG and scale it down for viewing on a webpage. You can read about how to do this here http://www.alistapart.com/articles/hiresprinting
It has the advantage of being able to view the image at normal size on the screen whilst being able to take advantage of the extra resolution when printing. And it won't involve people having to open Acrobat. You could also generate a unique coupon number for each coupon with some simple CSS trickery.

One thing I would recommend if you go with this method is to stick to flat colours. If you use lots of gradients the high-res PNG will be a rather large file size.

Ok this might seem like a stupid question but how can you make a high resolution or low resolution image in inkscape?

Say if you don't have a concept of resolution, as it applies to print work. It's a science you have to be familiar with if you do any sort of print work.

Otherwise, in Inkscape when you 'Export to Bitmap' simply increase the DPI value for the 'Bitmap size'. By default I think it's 90 DPI but for print work you want a minimum of 140 and a maximum of 300. You can go higher than 300 but in most cases the difference won't be that noticeable.

microUgly wrote:I think the PDF producted by Inkscape is just a high resolution bitmap, so the only advantage to using it is that you can be sure it'll print to size.

Nope, tis vectors. Thats why gradients and blurs dont export properly to pdf.

Simarilius wrote:Nope, tis vectors. Thats why gradients and blurs dont export properly to pdf.

Ah, I must have created the PDF I was looking at using Acrobat Printer instead of Inkscape's built in PDF writer.

Thanks for the feedback guys. I should have something soon and if you wouldn't mind, I'll post one here for input. I am loving InkScape!

you can post here, as long as we can use the coupons - i love a bargain!

does your client have an australian branch?

MS notebook can also print the copy of the main thing of the forum. So you should try one of them, it is the best for practice.