Okay so basicly after I save a file from Inkscape into an .EPS format whenever I try to look at it in either Gimp or PS there's a white background that shows up in the file that wasn't in the orignial. The orignial's background is blank, and the question I want to know is if there's a way to save without having this white background show up.

My files are for printing t-shirts and I don't know if this white background is going to be a problem for the printer

This is freelance work I'm doing for another company so I'm not in touch with their printers to be able to ask. And I don't know how this white background is going to effect things. If it's harmless or if I need to find the way to get rid of it.

Thanks to anybody who knows.

I can provide the file if you need to me also.

Look in your document properties dialog under file menu for the setting of the behaviour and colour of the background.

Okay I just looked. The color is set to white, with the opacity (alpha) set to 0, which should keep it transparent right?

I don't see a way to take the color out completely, but I'm also guessing that this is the default setting.

druban wrote:Look in your document properties dialog under file menu for the setting of the behaviour and colour of the background.

This setting only affects Inkscape's rendering on-canvas and bitmap export, but not export to PDF/EPS/PS, which always render the background white.

See also bug #166396 in Inkscape: “background color not exported to formats other than png”

Hmm that's weird because I know for a fact that in .46 it kept the transparent background instead of making it white.

But still, if anybody knows, as far as conveting the EPS back to a vector file, like say AI, will the white background show up there, or do I not have to worry about that?

Okay so I just updated to .48 and I still have the same problem.

I still know for a fact that this wasn't happening in .46, so why is it doing this with the newer versions?

I bumped on the same issue, and I am pretty sure it is linked to the use of cairo lib for eps export (that was not the case befor 0.47).

This is pretty anoying since it makes a lot of files useless in latex documents...

There is two problems linked to the switch to cairo for eps export for latex users :

* the eps file produced are not 'psfragable'
* You loose the transparent background


As a matter of fact, this two problems are show stopper for me since Inkscape is the tool I use to produce allmost all my graphics I put in latex documents.

It would be very cool to keep the transparent backgroud export to eps.
Another pretty thing would be to have the otpion to not include subset only of the font (and maybe to restrict the font type to basic ones) in order to produce psfragable eps... For that second point a trick consists in using a modified(earlier ?) version of cairo lib.

I will try to look at to eps of the same thing, one with white background and the other without to see if a simple change to the os code would do the trick

This appears to be fixed in 0.48.2.

I think it's worth mentioning that if there are any transparent objects in the image, the transparent background will be exported as white to the eps. This was a source of confusion for me and certainly is a bug.