I know that in previous versions of Inkscape there was a shortcoming that caused bitmaps/raster images to be recompressed when exporting a drawing containing them into pdf format. This was supposedly fixed in the latest stable release (0.91). However, when I'm trying to export an svg file containing a png image (roughly 70 KiB) into pdf, the resulting pdf file will be over 300 KiB in size. I am not able to find any other explanation than that the original png is decompressed, then recompressed with a less efficient encoding before saving it into the pdf.

The svg file producing this behavior is as an attachment. If it matters, I'm using the portable version of Inkscape 0.91 on winXP sp3.

Surprisingly, jpg images seem to be saved into pdf files just fine, without recompression or any other processing. I confirmed this by examining the pdf produced by Inkscape with a hex editor, and found that it contained a bit-by-bit copy of the original jpg. Unfortunately the same is not true for png images.

Could it be that I have missed something, eg. a well-hidden setting that needs to be set a certain way to avoid the recompression? Or have I bumped into a genuine anomaly in Inkscape's behavior?

I beleive the following settings should help:

• Preferences (Strl+Scift+P)
• Bitmaps
• Import

Than make sure that settings is:

• Bitmap scale (image-rendering) = "None (auto)"
• Default import resolution = 90
• Override file resolution = Yes